


War Crimes

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate History, Gen, Military
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-04 11:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17303561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: Hollis Downey never meant to join the army – but here he is, serving as the assistant to Valentine Schneider, a bitter German pressed into service as the major surgeon of an unnamed regiment of the Union Army.Hollis has little idea what he’s doing, but in between bouts of grumbling and horrific surgery, Schneider grudgingly teaches him the ropes of battlefield medicine in the 1870s. But Schneider seems to be hiding a terrible secret – and as the war drags onward, Hollis begins to believe that this secret may be very important indeed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a veritable layer cake of old text, which I will now do my best to explain.
> 
> In 2008 I tried to write an overly-ambitious alternate-history novel, which fizzled. I tried it again a few years later, and that also fizzled, but after a year or so I went back, commented on the whole draft, and posted it on Tumblr. 
> 
> This turned out to have been an ill-advised decision, so I decided to just repost it all on AO3.
> 
> There’s a great deal of backstory going on here, but it’s really immaterial to the thing as it stands:
> 
> It’s approximately 1875. There’s a war in the continental US. There’s some guys. They’re surgeons with the Union Army. It’s a bad time.
> 
> Formatting notes:
> 
> 1, everything after this introductory note was written between 2011 and 2013. The story itself, 2011. Commentary, which is [ **bolded in brackets** ], 2013.
> 
> 2, while I have done my best, there are probably more than a few formatting mistakes.
> 
> Relevant warning: it’s a story about military surgeons in the 19th century, there’s medical gore in here.
> 
> Edit: you ever notice you put the wrong date in when posting? That's fixed now! For what it's worth, I went over the text over the last week of 2018 and posted it in January 2019.

She gave him her father’s medal [ **probably of St. Christopher, patron of travelers, soldiers, and sailors** ] to shield him from harm. Her hands were warm against his neck when she looped the thin chain around it.

“Thank you,” he said, touching the medal with his fingers, his hand covering hers before he slipped the medal under his shirt.

“You can’t take it off until you come home,” she said, clasping his hand in hers for a moment.

“I won’t,” he promised.

“You’ll write to me?” She was wearing blue, and it brought out her eyes, made them look the color of the bright summer sky; would he ever see her so again?

“Of course,” he said. She was so small, so delicate – he could hardly leave her here alone, but his hard-headed Adelaide insisted that she needed no help to handle the affairs of the house herself while he was gone. After all, he’d be back so soon she’d hardly miss him.

“All right,” she said, and smiled at him. “Goodbye.”

He kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you.”

She watched him leave, standing on the porch with her hands solemnly clasped. She was wearing one of her good dresses – the blue gown [ **this was me being a snarky ass about the fact that “white weddings” are a modern tradition** ] was the one she’d worn at their wedding, in fact – and it only made him more determined to come home to her as soon as he could.

He couldn’t leave her _alone_ looking as pretty as she did.

* * *

First Lieutenant Ashley Royce was waiting for him in town.

“You’re ready to leave, Mister Downey?” He seemed a decent enough man, but Hollis was glad he wouldn’t really be serving under Royce. Technically he was Hollis’s superior, but Hollis was to answer to the surgeon he was assisting – the surgeon would answer to Royce’s superior. [ **Pretty much none of this is correct, as I discovered while doing further research into the Union Army of the time.** ]

“Yes, sir.” He saluted, and Royce smiled.

“No need for that yet.” He waved Hollis into the carriage, and he folded himself inside. “Rank doesn’t start until we arrive at the cantonment, and we aren’t there yet.”

Hollis nodded, already feeling rather out of his depth. He hadn’t been in the army a month yet, and he was puzzled with it – certainly things were off to a great start. “Where’s Doctor Schneider?” He was given to understand that that was the name of the man he’d be serving under, but he knew that it might be someone entirely different. There was always a possibility of that.

Royce nodded as the carriage lurched forward along the cobbled streets. “You’ll meet him at the cantonment. He’s been there some time, treating the enlisted men for dysentery and typhoid, that sort of thing. Doubtless he’ll be glad to have your help; most of the lads seem to be wet behind the ears still, no use in the infirmary.”

 _Typhoid_? Dysentery was endemic to the army, he knew that much, but _typhoid_ … Well. He probably would be glad to have a willing helper, but he might be somewhat dismayed to learn that Hollis was no doctor, only a humble chemist. [ **Assistant surgeons at the time were, to a man, medical doctors. I may keep this detail with the excuse of “there were very few trained doctors/surgeons in the army, and those who were were stretched very thin along the long front line.** ]

"Is the typhoid… epidemic?” If it were, _well._ If it were only isolated cases, Schneider would probably see little difficulty handling it.

“When I left this morning there were sixteen men down with typhoid,” Royce responded. “Schneider will bring you up to speed when you arrive. Until then, I suggest patience.”

 _Patience_ , he said, when by Hollis’s rough judgment there was a typhoid epidemic in the cantonment.

Strange things were afoot in the Union Army.

* * *

Schneider seemed rather young to be an army medic, Hollis thought – he had a surprisingly fresh face, with sharp eyes behind smudged glasses. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his brushy beard was a startling red, in contrast to his hair. But his uniform was pressed, and his lab coat relatively clean.

Hollis stepped tentatively into the infirmary. “Doctor Schneider?”

“Wer ist?” [ **“What is it?” This draft is full of untranslated German.** ] snapped the doctor, moving to the next bed and unrolling a length of bandage as he eyed an infected-looking wound on a young man’s arm.

 _And here I thought I’d be serving under someone who spoke English…_ Hollis stepped forward, bravely donning his best smile and trying to remember his German. “Ich bin Hollis Downey,” [ **“I am Hollis Downey.”** ] he managed.

“Sehr gut,” [ **“Very good.”** ] said Schneider, as he dabbed at the wound with a clean cloth he seemed to have produced from nowhere. The young man was biting down on the side of his other hand, eyes squeezed closed, but Schneider seemed not to notice at all.

“Tut mir leid, Herr Schneider,” [ **“I am sorry, Mr. Schneider.”** ] said Hollis as he watched Schneider irrigate the wound, water dripping carelessly onto the floor. “Mein Deutsche sind… nicht sehr schoen. Sprechen Sie Englische?” [ **“My German is… not so good. Do you speak English?”** ]

“Ja,” said Schneider, swiping at the wound with the same cloth he’d been dabbing with before. He looked up, suddenly bewildered. “Sind Sie nicht der deutsche Mann?” [ **“Aren’t you the German man?”** ]

“No, I’m not,” he said, having run out of patience with German for the time being. “I’m Hollis Downey and I’ve been sent to assist you. I’m not German at all.”

Schneider exhaled through his nose, sounding exasperated as he wrapped the young soldier’s arm in bandaging. “I was told that Headquarters was sending me a German.”

“Headquarters must have made a mistake.”

“Quite likely.” He stood up, rewinding the leftover bandage into a roll, shoving the dirty cloth into a pocket. He extended a hand and Hollis shook it. “I am Doctor Valentine Schneider – to these men,” he said, indicating the ward with a sweep of his arm, “that’s ‘Doctor’ or 'Medic’. To you…” He shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m not paid to care what you call me.”

He moved past Hollis to the next bed, bending to check the pulse of the unconscious man there. “One of our typhoid cases,” he said, indicating the man in the bed when he straightened up. “Patient Zero, I believe, since he’s almost recovered now.”

“How did you control the spread of the disease, Doctor?” Hollis asked, tagging along as Schneider moved down the row of beds attending to his patients.

“How do you think?” He snorted derisively, moving to stand in the aisle and face Hollis. “We isolate them, ensure that the miasma cannot spread. All sixteen were sleeping in the same area when they sickened. We ventilated more efficiently and no more became sick.” He looked over his glasses at Hollis, his eyes cold. “You’re not a doctor, are you?”

“No,” Hollis admitted, glad to be shed of the lie. “I’m a chemist.”

Schneider raised one eyebrow. “Good. If you were a doctor I’d wonder where you got your license that you don’t know the first thing about typhoid.” He exhaled, adjusted his glasses. “So. A chemist. Why did you ask to serve as a surgeon’s assistant?" 

He shrugged. "I was going to be conscripted anyway; I thought I would be best able to use my skills in that position, rather than as a rank-and-file soldier.”

Schneider nodded. “Good. There are some who think it’ll be all roses, no battlefield fighting, no blood.” He smirked. “The surgeon is the one who has to fix the soldiers who come back alive from the field, ja? You see less blood fighting than you will in the hospital tent with me. It will not be clean.”

Hollis had already considered the lot – if this was Schneider trying to make him put in a request to be transferred, he wasn’t going to succeed. He was a chemist, not a nancy-boy – he wasn’t fond of blood, but he’d rather serve his time stitching men up and saving them than killing them.

Schneider was watching him, his eyes still cold behind his round glasses, his face somber, smirk gone. “Are you ready, Herr Downey?” That snarling German accent matched his angled countenance perfectly; he was almost sinister.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sehr gut.” He nodded, gestured toward a cabinet against the wall. “There are spare coats in there, rolls of bandage as well. You’ll need them. I expect you not to make a nuisance of yourself – these men need rest if they are to recover and be fit for battle.”

“Yes, sir.” He intended to watch what Schneider did and copy it, keep out of the way as much as possible.

Schneider smiled. “I suspect we’ll get along, Herr Downey.”

 _For my sake, we’d better._ Schneider had the look of a man who was proficient with scalpels and the use of them, and wouldn’t hesitate to use them on anyone who got in his way.

“I hope that we will,” he muttered.

Schneider clapped his hands, watching as Hollis donned a lab coat and took a roll of bandage from the cabinet. “So! Let us begin.”

* * *

Hollis hesitated outside the tent. Schneider had dismissed him an hour ago, and told him where he was assigned to sleep; since then he’d been hesitating, unsure if he should go introduce himself to his tentmates or not.

Now he’d completed every possible task that could keep him from his tent, and damn it all, he was tired.

He muttered a curse under his breath and stepped forward – whoever it was he was assigned to bunk with, they couldn’t be worse than Schneider.

He was surprised, however, by how much not-worse his tentmate was.

When he pushed open the tent flap and stepped inside, he almost knocked his head against the lantern hanging from the support pole. Hearing his quiet curse (his mother would be ashamed to hear her boy blaspheming the Lord, Hollis was sure, but she was ten years in her grave, bless her soul), his tentmate looked up.

Either he was a child, Hollis thought dimly, or they didn’t make boys like they used to. His hair was a froth of dark curls, his eyes wide and innocent; he was something like the diametrical opposite of Schneider.

“You must be Hollis,” said the boy, closing his book and hopping to his feet. In closer proximity, he looked like a gawky teenager less than a boy; with faint stubble on his cheeks and limbs that didn’t seem to fit him, he was awkward as a colt, and Hollis was amused that he hadn’t tripped over himself in the process of standing.

“I am,” he said, shaking the boy’s hand – it was rough with calluses, unusual for someone who looked like he’d come fresh from an innocent, idle city life.

“I’m Liam,” said the boy, “Liam the video game DOOM. Good to meet you, though it doesn’t seem like we’ll be seeing much of each other. Based on today, I mean.”

Hollis blinked. “Well, I was assisting Doctor Schneider in the infirmary, since I’m his assistant and all, so… no…”

Liam waved his hand negligently. “No, no, that’s fine.”

“How old _are_ you?” Hollis said, unable to be tactful faced with this boy who looked like he ought to be at home on a farm somewhere, or at school. “You can’t be more than fourteen – how did you get yourself into the _army_?”

His face went sour – the boy looked as though he’d bitten into a lemon. “I’m _nineteen_ ,” he said, as if it made all the difference in the world.

“You don’t look it.”

“I know I don’t,” he said, and sighed. “Don’t make me kick you out.”

 _He couldn’t evict a mouse_. “All right,” Hollis said, smiling. “I’d rather not sleep outside tonight.”

“Neither would I,” said Liam. “I’d rather have you in here – it’s warmer with two people.” The tent held four – apparently the other two hadn’t yet arrived.

“That it is,” Hollis agreed, and knelt to unroll his blanket.

“So how old are _you_?” said Liam, watching with interest.

“Twenty-four,” he said shortly.

“You have a girl at home?” His book was forgotten, and Hollis wished he’d pick it up again. Dealing with Schneider had him tired enough – the last thing he needed tonight was this talkative boy.

“I’m married.” He touched his medal, rubbing it between his fingers.

Liam nodded. “You were conscripted.”

He dropped the medal, looking up sharply. “How did you know?” he demanded.

Liam raised his hands. “You’re a married man, so my guess is that you didn’t _choose_ to enlist – and you don’t seem too happy to be here. _So_ you’re a conscript like me.”

“Fascinating,” Hollis said dryly. “Are you going to keep talking all night or do I get a chance to sleep?” If he didn’t shut his mouth, Hollis would be more than glad to sleep outside that night – the cantonment at night was little colder than home, and he’d slept out under the stars more than once before.

The boy – _boy_ he remained, even if he were old enough to be conscripted into the army – flushed and dropped his gaze. “Sorry,” he stammered.

“I’ve been in the infirmary all day,” said Hollis, stripping off his boots and puttees. “The last thing I need is to be up all night _talking_. We can make proper introductions in the morning.” He removed his jacket and balled it into a rough pillow, shoving it under his head as he lay down. “Good _night,_ Mister the video game DOOM.”

"Good night,“ said Liam.

He didn’t get it, Hollis realized as he threw an arm over his face to shut out the oppressive lantern light. And he probably wouldn’t until Hollis kicked his teeth in or shouted at him or something – or, God forbid, he became one of Hollis’s patients through some other means.

Damned teenagers. They’d be the death of him.

[ **This chapter is a prime example of the reason I decided to trash this draft and rewrite. All of the military details were wrong, which left the rest of the plot on shaky foundations.** ]


	2. Chapter 2

“Mach schnell, Maedchen,” snapped Schneider, and Hollis almost stabbed himself with the needle. “You think he will stop bleeding because you are slow?”

“No, sir,” Hollis muttered automatically, continuing his suturing as Schneider held the patient down. He tied off the thread in a knot and groped for a cloth, patting away the blood oozing from the bullet wound.

“Ach,” Schneider said dourly, addressing the patient (who, Hollis had to think, could not possibly understand him if he heard, given that the whiskey he’d drunk before Schneider extracted the Minie ball lodged in his thigh had long since worn off and he was more than likely in the process of biting through his tongue), “if that bullet had been an inch to the left you would be dead by now.”

And as it is, Hollis continued to himself, forcing the curved needle through the thick skin of the thigh, he probably won’t live to see battle, if he keeps the leg. Schneider would insist to the contrary, but Hollis very much had his doubts. You couldn’t have a bullet go clean into the meat of your leg and skip merrily off to battle after a few months – it made no sense. [ **I think I was laying it on a little thick with Hollis as the spirit of genuine 1870s medicine, or at the least, making him sound like an idiot.** ]

He tied off the final suture. “Done!”

Schneider took his weight off the patient’s hip. “Sehr gut.” He checked his pocket watch. “Two minutes for a wound three inches long. I think you can do better, mein Herr.”

Hollis swiped at his brow with his sleeve – he was dripping sweat. Their unfortunate patient had been the victim of what he claimed was an accident while practicing his aim with a friend – why they were using valuable ammunition while doing so, he’d refused to tell. Schneider hadn’t bothered asking, simply handed him the whiskey that acted as rudimentary pain control and barked at Hollis to fetch him forceps and scalpel.

“Whiskey, bitte,” said Schneider, and Hollis handed him the bottle, thinking wistfully of his chemical laboratory at home. [ **I don’t understand why. Was he making moonshine? Sadly, there are a lot of weird-ass asides like this.** ]

Schneider poured off a measure of the alcohol into a battered tin cup and squeezed the patient’s shoulder. He made no reaction, and Schneider prised his lips open with the fingers of his free hand, then poured the whiskey down his throat.

Hollis found it humorous – they used exactly the same compound as anesthetic and artificial awakener. It didn’t work very efficiently as either, but it was cheap and easily available.

The patient coughed, spluttered, and opened his eyes. Schneider helped him sit up and watched as he shook his head and rubbed at his temples.

Hollis stepped tactfully back, making use of the moment to drop the used needle back into its storage tin with the others and discard the excess thread. After Schneider shooed this man out the door, there were rounds to make – thankfully, fewer than yesterday, since some of the typhoid patients were recovering enough to be released.

Or for Schneider to boot them out the door, at least. Hollis had begun to respect his roughness, somewhat – it seemed that Schneider was solely responsible for the running of the infirmary at the cantonment. He handled it well, though.

The patient yanked his trousers up under Schneider’s cold gaze, and Hollis almost cracked a smile. He wasn’t much for bedside manner, but the treatment he gave… well, it could’ve been worse, though compared to the doctors Hollis knew, all proponents of the soft-touch treatment, he was a bit of a hard man. He did well enough.

That emphasis on time, though – he found it curious. Serving at the cantonment, Schneider had probably come straight from civilian life. Were surgeons so focused on time there? He could rationalize it being an important focus in battle medicine – lavishing attention and time on one patient there necessarily meant sacrificing others, all of whom were needed on their feet as soon as possible.

“Raus!” Schneider snarled, fairly shoving the man out of the door. “Try not to get shot again if you can.”

A week ago Hollis would have kept his mouth shut, perhaps winced at Schneider’s harshness. Today, he smirked at it.

It had been a rough week.

“That type of man tends to get shot more than is healthy,” he said, wiping his hands again with a cloth, trying to scrub away the residue around his nails.

Schneider sighed. “True, mein Freund. I expect he’ll be back within the week.” He set the bottle of whiskey down on the table; Hollis tossed him the cloth and he scrubbed gratefully at his forehead with it.

The doctor looked worn down; his forehead shone with sweat, and he’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves by ten that morning. It had been a wickedly hot day, even in the comparatively cool infirmary; Hollis dreaded to think of how infernal the temperature must be outside. He himself had eschewed the lab coat that marked him as assistant to Schneider – it was one layer too many in the heat.

Schneider checked his pocket watch, wiping at the back of his neck with the cloth before tossing it down. “Hmph.”

“May I ask you some questions, Doctor?” Hollis ventured. The worst Schneider could do was answer in the negative, and if he did it was no skin off Hollis’s back.

He snapped his pocket watch closed with an authoritative little metallic click. “Not at the moment, mein Herr – there are patients to be seen,” he said crisply. “Perhaps later tonight – are you busy?”

“I can’t say that I am,” said Hollis – the only thing he had to look forward to, if you could call it that, was the chatty teenager he shared a tent with, and he would rather delay that ‘homecoming’ as long as he could, thank you very much.

“What a coincidence,” said Schneider, and gave a little mocking bow. “Neither am I. Shall I expect you at eight?”

“Fair enough.” Late enough that whenever Schneider finished with him and he got back to his tent, Liam would more than likely be asleep; a small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. He was a nice enough boy, but irritating in high doses.

“I’ll bring the brandy and answers to your questions.” He yanked his shirtsleeves back down to his wrists – he’d pushed them up to his elbows at some point while extracting the bullet from their patient’s thigh. “But you must also answer my questions, ja?”

He had a crafty look in his eyes that Hollis didn’t like, but what was the worst he could do, after all?

* * *

“So.” Schneider clasped his hands together – they were strangely white, Hollis saw – and looked at Hollis over his glasses. “You have been so kind as to allow me to take up your time this evening – now, I will answer your questions.”

“How did you come to the army?” Hollis asked – frankly, he had hundreds of questions he could have asked, but that one seemed most pertinent, and perhaps most easily answered, although it was not to be.

Schneider seemed less irritated at first by the question than he had been by Hollis’s slow suturing; his lips thinned and his brow furrowed, but he seemed less angered by the question than bitter over the answer. “Not willingly,” he said, and drank from his glass – fine blown glass in a cantonment, Hollis had noticed almost at once: he must save the tin for patients. And how did he intend to take the glass with him to the front – would he leave it behind, or what?

“I am not a victim of conscription, as so many here are,” he continued.

_Then what are you?_

Schneider stared moodily at his glass and the motion of its contents, their dark gold, almost glowing color. “I am, one might say, a prisoner of war.” He snorted gently, and Hollis had the feeling he was talking more to himself than to his visitor. “Being that I was a doctor, and not an active combatant, I was given the choice to have my history… wiped clean, one might say. Once I was examined for any information that was usable, they brought me here and gave me free reign over their sick and dying – what damage can the German do on those who are already ill?”

Hollis dabbed his lips with his handkerchief. There was really no way to meet something like that, but he was certain he’d come up with something to say. He had to.

He didn’t have to.

“How did you come to the army, mein Freund?” said Schneider, and then raised a hand before Hollis could answer. “Ach – don’t tell me 'conscription’. Certainly a man such as you could… avoid becoming a conscript. But you did not – tell me why.”

“I have a wife at home,” said Hollis, after searching for a place to begin.

Schneider nodded. “Many do. Go on.”

 _Shut up, I am telling a story_ , Hollis thought, but cleared his throat instead. There was really no tactful way to proceed. “I didn’t have the money to send someone in my place,” he said simply. “I’m a chemist. The army offered better pay for me as a run-of-the-mill soldier than I could get back home doing what I trained to do, so there was really no question. So I’m here.”

Schneider frowned. “Hmph. From you, I expected something more exciting than that. Perhaps I misjudged.” He shook his head, dismissing the notion. “More brandy?”

[ **This scene is a little melodramatic, but with some cuts I think it could still work. Also, the further we go in this draft, the more it will become very obvious** ** ~~who I was thinking of when writing Valentine’s dialogue…~~** **Let’s not be coy. If you’re not hearing Robin Atkin Downes as The Medic when you’re reading Valentine’s lines, you should be, because that’s who I was 'hearing’.** ]

* * *

Liam was still awake.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“None of your business,” snapped Hollis, shedding his jacket and rummaging for a relatively clean piece of paper. The pencil was easy enough – he’d tucked one in the pocket of his trousers earlier.

“Sorry,” Liam said, then perked up as he watched Hollis. “Say – have you been issued any weapons yet?”

“No. I won’t be on the front lines.” He tapped the point of the pencil against his front teeth, thinking of how to begin. He hated beginnings – middles he could handle, but beginnings… not so much.

“Hmm.” Liam raised one eyebrow. “Maybe you’re lucky. The rifles they issued are terrible.”

“That’s great.”

 _Dear Addie_ , he decided on. Telling her about Schneider probably wasn’t wise; it would worry her, and worry served her no purpose.

What was safe to write about, then?

_I am bunking with a young man from Green’s Town, Ill. He is easy enough to get along with but I will be glad when I am posted to my final deployment._

He paused, trying to think of what else he could tell her. Frankly, nothing much was happening at the cantonment: the typhoid epidemic was in hand (and besides, he couldn’t write about typhoid to a woman, even if she was his wife) and no one seemed to be getting in much trouble. He wasn’t exactly well versed in current camp gossip, but there didn’t even seem to be any enjoyable scut doing the rounds – he found himself longing for the halls of academia, where someone was always talking about someone else behind his back.

Well, the weather was an old standby.

_It has been very hot here – I miss Foxgrove already, though I have been at the cantonment only these few weeks. Working in the infirmary with Dr. Schneider I have seen more than a few men overcome by the heat and resultantly in need of medical treatment._

Schneider usually prescribed, in such cases, muttered German profanity and rehydration. Occasionally he extended the hand of kindness so far as to recommend that the men avoid over-exerting themselves on the hottest days, but such times were rare.

He frowned, tapping his pencil on the paper – then, sighing as he noticed how dull the point had become, he located his knife and began to sharpen it.

He’d covered the weather satisfactorily, mentioned his tentmate. Hmph. Well, if nothing else, he could use the letter as an excuse to get a few… concerns off his mind.

 _I am sorely missing your cooking, my dear Ada_ , he wrote. He was – stew really wasn’t acceptable as a meal day in and day out. And hardtack, though durable, didn’t even really count as food. It struck him as more of a building material, if anything. _Army food is nourishing enough for the body, but I find it lacks the qualities, whatever they are, which make mere food transcend the border from nourishment for the body to nourishment for the soul. As an example of this disheartening tendency, I am enclosing a sample of the 'hard tack’ we are issued as part of our rations. I am sure it will not suffer in the mails, and that you will enjoy the contrast it forms to your own baked goods._

There was nothing else to say – oh, he could write her a love letter, tell her he missed her, but he wanted to tell someone about Schneider’s strangeness, or the uniform that didn’t fit him, or the ill-made boots that wouldn’t last on a hard year’s farm work.

Unfortunately, those weren’t the kinds of things one wrote home to one’s wife about.

He bit his lip. Perhaps he needed a friend.

[ **The letter feels unnecessary, and I think more Awkward Chitchat Over Brandy wouldn’t go amiss. In the original context, we were meant to have known these characters for several years and two books by this point, but as far as they’re concerned, they met a few weeks or a month ago…** ]


	3. Chapter 3

Hollis was abruptly awoken by a bucket of cold water to the face and an angry German shouting at him.

Luckily, this was not a common occurrence – the German shouting was, the cold water was not.

“Up! Raus! Get up or I will have you _sent home_!”

 _The hell you will_ , Hollis thought, calmly wiping the water from his face while Liam sputtered in confusion on the other side of the tent. [ **Fun fact: Hollis should almost certainly have at least one more tentmate. Maybe they’re deep sleepers.** ] One of the things Schneider had told him was that he was more than grateful for Hollis’s arrival – he was as good an assistant as any, and a good deal better than the run of the conscripted men in the army, most of whom had, according to the good doctor, stopped their education before leaving grammar school.

“What’s the matter?” said Hollis, as Schneider stood, fuming, at the entrance of the tent. “Epidemic?” Schneider seemed to fear nothing but an epidemic, the particular cause of which didn’t matter – it was the sickening of the whole cantonment, with himself as the only medical man to treat them, that frightened him. Not that one could easily tell, but it gave him the spooks, all right, and no bones about it.

“I wish it were!” Schneider hissed. “Up! We’re being shipped out!”

“Already?” Hollis tugged on his boots; he’d made a habit out of sleeping mostly dressed since Schneider had begun making a habit of waking him in the middle of the night to attend to a patient. Schneider claimed he was merely trying to habituate Hollis to what would become necessity when he was living on the front lines – Hollis both wondered how he could be so certain and was convinced that he could adapt rapidly enough once he was on the front lines.

“Yes, already!” Schneider himself was for once in full uniform, with his knapsack hanging from one shoulder and his doctor’s bag in the other hand. His glasses were slipping down his nose, and his open anxiety and fury seemed to be doing no good keeping them in place.

Hollis quickly rolled his blanket up and tied it to his knapsack, then jerked the knapsack up to hang from his shoulder. That was all, really – he saw little reason to sleep with his few possessions wholly unpacked. It was a cantonment, not a permanent camp, after all. He yanked his forage cap down about his ears – really, he didn’t see why they’d issued him one, but he wasn’t about to complain about it.

Liam was openly staring, blanket clutched up around his chin – he looked  _young_ , younger than most of the soldiers in the cantonment (if you could call them soldiers at all – they seemed more like cadets, especially in the respect of age), like a child awoken from a nightmare. Or awoken  _into_ one, considering Schneider’s reputation in the cantonment.

“Let’s not waste any more time, then,” said Hollis, who found himself glad to be bidding Liam a final goodbye. Hollis would no longer come back to the tent and be kept up by a talkative schoolboy, and Liam would no longer have to put up with being awoken at unpredictable times by an angry German, possibly equipped with a bucket of frigid water.

“Then _raus_ , Herr Downey,” said Schneider, but the furious, hissing note had gone out of his voice.

Hollis stepped out of the tent, pausing at the ‘threshold’ to bid Liam what he fancied was a jaunty goodbye, complete with wave.

Liam waved back, and Hollis believed he was probably glad to see the back of his former tentmate. He almost seemed to have an expression of relief on his face.

It was a swampy, humid day, and the ground outside was tacky, no longer outright muddy – Hollis found himself slipping a little on the soles of his boots, though Schneider seemed to be just fine. He strode on through the rows of tents with a grim expression and a sense of purpose about him; during a late-night brandy session he had intimated to Hollis that the ability to appear grim and determined was a talent he was quite proud of. Apparently he had learned it in medical school at some point, though Hollis was of the opinion that medical school had merely been the occasion of that talent’s refinement: Schneider had probably been aloof from birth.

They tromped past the administration buildings and came to the road that ran in front, where a rough cart was waiting, drawn by two weary-looking old nags.

Schneider kept going after Hollis stopped, but, to his credit, did notice the lack of a follower eventually – further to his credit, he came back for Hollis.

“What’s the matter? Leave the fire burning?” It was already growing hot, and Schneider’s temper was resultantly worsening.

“That can’t be how we’re getting to the front,” Hollis said, eyeing the cart. It was falling apart, for God’s sake. “Isn’t there a train? There ought to be a train.”

“There _is_ a train, you fool,” Schneider said. “The cart takes us to the train, do you understand?”

Hollis scratched his nose, trying to beat back an embarrassed flush. _Brought that upon myself, I suppose._ “Well, you didn’t _say_ that,” he managed.

“Do I have to tell you _everything_? I thought they sent me an assistant,” Schneider huffed, resuming his progress toward the cart. “I am a _doctor_ , not a nursemaid.”

“Hallo, Herr Doktor,” said the driver as the two men approached the cart. “Wer ist das bei Ihnen?” [ **“Who is this with you?”** ]

“Er is mein Assistent,” Schneider said curtly, swinging his knapsack from his shoulder into the back of the cart, then swinging himself in after it.

“Guten Morgen,” said Hollis, attempting to be polite.

The driver only nodded, and Hollis, rather chagrinned, [ **take a shot – actually, the official drinking game for anything penned by me is “take a shot for every dash, semicolon, or colon”** ] got in the back of the cart alongside Schneider, who had the temerity to smirk.

* * *

The train was no better than the cart, though it did make Hollis curious.

“I’ve heard they have the common soldiers march to the front, Doctor,” he said, watching the countryside slide by out the window. “Why do we warrant a train?”

“Wir sind Ärzte, mein Freund,” [ **“We’re doctors, my friend.”]** said Schneider. “Die Soldaten…” He waved his hand idly. “Let _them_ march, but not the doctors.”

Schneider seemed melancholy, more so than usual, and Hollis wondered why that could be. It was not rising early that made him so reticent – certainly he had risen early in the morning for years. It must be something else, some other element, some uncontrolled, unforeseen variable…

Hollis turned his attention to the countryside beyond their window, pine trees and grassy meadows alternately passing by. He missed his old laboratory keenly then – working in the infirmary was good enough, he supposed, since it at least gave him the ability to see scientific equipment during his day’s work. And it all smelled right, at least – alcohol and carbolic soap, clean, cold scientific odors.

But there was also the reek of blood, the scent of illness, which overwhelmed the scent of… er, science. He missed his retorts, his Erlenmeyer flasks, even the Bunsen burners. [ **Why did he have a private lab? Where was it? I don’t know.** ]

Compared to chemistry, medicine seemed… unscientific. Schneider hardly used scientific equipment, unless he was mixing medicines, but even then he mostly seemed to play it all by ear, guessing at quantities in a way that almost pained Hollis to see. He would never do such things in his laboratory at home. Chemistry was about _precision_ – there was no room to carelessly estimate and freehand measurements.

And then again. Chemicals were finicky – men didn’t seem to be, so much. The man whose leg he’d sutured his first week here was healing well, not even limping. The typhoid patients survived at rates that astounded him, although it didn’t take much to astound a man who was used to seeing those sick with typhoid simply die.

Schneider possessed no particular skill in curing the disease that Hollis had seen kill without regard to man’s attempt to stop it – not according to him he didn’t. He claimed that his methods were perfectly standard and in accordance with facts well-known to every remotely educated medical man, from the lowest student to the most experienced doctor.

Unsurprisingly, it had been over brandy that he expressed this – Schneider _hated_ 'talking shop’, as he termed it, within the earshot of his patients.

He had eyed Hollis critically over the top of his glass. “I’m no magician, mein lieber Mann,” he said, sipping delicately at the brandy. “Cholera is a diarrheal disease, and it has been treated by rehydration therapy for forty years. [ **No, really. Unlike the military details, I actually researched the medical details. Sort of.** ] Typhoid is also a diarrheal – we rehydrate, and the recovery period is cut to a week, if that.”

He wasn’t lying, either, as Hollis had seen himself. Schneider’s therapy had seemed absurd at first – jabbing needles into the veins of the sick, and letting a liquid solution flow into the blood from glass bottles hung beside the bed. But it worked, somehow. Hollis didn’t understand how, but it _worked_.

If there were an ethical way to do it – and despite his roots in the cold science of chemistry, he did adhere strictly to ethical guidelines in life and work both – he would have investigated why. But he was no doctor, and knew it – _why_ rehydration worked was an investigation better left to someone who knew the functions of the body. He did not.

He wanted to know why rehydration worked – he longed to know – because if he knew why, he could make it work better. Schneider’s current formula had to be given in massive doses. There had to be a way to make it more efficient – if only he knew how it functioned as a cure.

“A penny for them,” said Schneider softly.

Hollis had the regrettable habit of speaking his mind.

“Medicine makes no _sense_.”

Schneider blinked once and adjusted his glasses.

“Normally, mein Freund, I do not make a habit of drinking before noon. In your case, however… I believe it will be quite beneficial to the health.” A small silver flask appeared in his hand – had Hollis been paying more attention he would have noticed that Schneider drew it from a inside pocket of his jacket, but distracted as he was it appeared to him nearly magic in character.

“Thank you,” said Hollis, and took a hearty sip of what tasted like cheap vodka and burnt like backwoods homebrew. “What is this?”

Schneider grinned, showing far more teeth than were usually displayed in a simple smile. “I thought you might appreciate it. I am something of an amateur chemist myself – I cooked this up in my spare time, when I had spare time, and I have been aging it since.” [ **I don't remember Valentine having a still…** ]

Which explained why it tasted like homebrew liquor – it was. And if that was Schneider’s standard for chemical talent, _well_. Hollis had known, in his misspent (but _exciting_ ) youth, tens of uneducated hillbillies who had _chemical talent_ by that standard – and most of them had had more than Schneider’s creation displayed.

“May I speak frankly, Doctor?” said Hollis, handing back the flask.

“Of course, of course,” he said, slipping the flask back into his pocket with something verging on sleight of hand, then spreading his hands wide in a generous gesture. “What are friends for? I only regret that you feel you must ask.”

_And I doubt you will be saying that when I tell you how absurd I find your methods and theories, and pretty much the entire field of medicine and every science that requires interaction with human beings._

Perhaps the Army was making him bitter.

“It needs work.”

Schneider smiled – not that grin full of too many teeth (especially the sharp ones, which seemed to be _all of them_ ), and not the sarcastic smirk, nor the put-upon smirk of the doctor surrounded by idiots, but what looked, at least, to be a real, honest smile. “Don’t kid yourself [ **Sir, I don’t think that expression is period.** ], or me. It is terrible. I’m surprised you didn’t spit it out, and I must say I apologize for offering it to you.”

“Have you asked anyone else to taste it?” said Hollis.

“Besides you, nein [ **like most of the German interpolations, very Hollywood and very unnecessary** ],” said Schneider, one hand rising to absently touch the temple of his glasses.

“Then it makes perfect sense to offer it to me,” Hollis said, determined to stick to this line of speech once he had begun it. “You must have tried it yourself and found it… less than palatable, but that left the possibility that it was your taste that was flawed and that you’d created something perfectly acceptable.”

The smile again. Hmm. He could get used to that. “Excellent. And to think I doubted you were a scientist.”

He could feel gratitude radiating off of Schneider – rare, and he relished it – most likely gratitude to be talking about science and rationality with someone who understood what those two words represented, at least somewhat. “Why doubt? I can understand lying about being, say, a military hero, but about being a chemist?”

Schneider leveled a cool, amused look at Hollis. “I’ve heard men tell me they were chemists when what they really mean is that they brew alcohol in a backwoods still.”

And the conversation came full circle. Hollis couldn’t help but smile himself.

Schneider grew pensive again. “I think I will keep this batch, though. It may make a good cleansing agent for surgical tools.”

“That it may,” Hollis agreed.

From the way it left his throat feeling, it probably would, too.

* * *

The train stopped, and Hollis found that he had fallen asleep.

He opened his eyes, rubbed the sleep from them, and shook his head. He didn’t feel entirely awake just yet, but he would soon.

If Schneider had been sleeping, he didn’t show it – he sat stiff and upright, staring at Hollis in a way that would have been disarming if Hollis hadn’t seen it in practice before.

“Welcome to Goldstadt, Herr Downey,” he said.

 _That can’t be a real town_ , thought Hollis,  _not an American town, anyway._ [ **He’s right. Goldstadt is the home of Doctor Frankenstein and the university he got kicked out of in James Whale’s** _Frankenstein_ **.** ]

“Where?” he said instead.

Schneider grinned and waved his hand, dismissing the question. “It doesn’t matter. This place is not actually Goldstadt – but it might as well be. Names mean nothing. Not here.”

How very philosophical. Hollis nodded, suppressing a yawn against the back of his hand. “So, are we stopping for more passengers, or is this where we disembark?”

Schneider’s grin faded. “I do not know – they don’t tell me such things, because I don’t need to know. But this is not the front line, I can tell you that much.”

“How can you be sure?”

Schneider’s eyes suddenly looked very cold, and Hollis remembered that he was, in point of fact, a prisoner of war. “Do you hear _guns_? If we were near the front you would hear the artillery firing. I do not hear artillery. I conclude we are not near the front.” He adjusted his glasses. “I then conclude that we have stopped to pick up additional passengers.”

Schneider seemed to be right; after a seemingly endless period of stillness, the train began to move again.

After a while, Hollis began to hear the sound of artillery; distant at first, then growing nearer and nearer.

[ **Overall not bad. But not my best effort either.** ]

[ **Also, while re-editing this because Tumblr ate the italics, I realized that there should be at least one more rule for the Things I Wrote drinking game:**

 **[Take a shot for superfluous italics. I’ve tried to excise the habit from my current writing, but it is endemic to things I wrote around the same time as this.** ]


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn’t much to look at, really – neater and more orderly than Hollis had expected. Yet it did seem as though it might be their final stop – he could hear the thunder of gunfire not too far in the distance, and smoke clouded the horizon.

He realized his fatal error then – he had paid absolutely no attention to any news of the war. He didn’t know if they were making progress or in retreat; if they were winning the war or losing. [ **Hollis is an idiot. Also I may be blinded by the fact I wrote it, but it seems that throughout this draft he’s more of a sounding board for Valentine than, like, an actual character.** ]

It seemed that Schneider had been right, in a way, all those times he called Hollis a fool. It was really the only name for a soldier who didn’t know if his army was winning or losing the war.

“How close are we to the front?” he asked, following close behind Schneider as he made his way… somewhere. He looked like he knew where he was going, which was good enough for Hollis.

“Close enough,” he said, avoiding the question, and then it seemed he thought better of it. “Currently we are in retreat.”

Right then. “Where are we going?”

“The medical cabins, and then the infirmary.” He seemed civil. Odd.

“We get cabins?” Hollis had expected tents.

“Surprisingly, yes.” Schneider laughed. “You are listed as an assistant surgeon in the army’s books now. Therefore you will sleep in the medical cabins where the other medical staff reside, not with the other enlisted men. [ **Continuity error, take a shot, he should’ve been in the medical cabins at the cantonment.** ]” He turned to face Hollis, an amused light fairly dancing in his eyes. “You would probably do well not to disabuse anyone of the notion that you are a surgeon, mein Freund. I’d hate to lose you.”

How touching. “I’ll be careful, then,” Hollis muttered as they mounted a ridge and began to descend the other side. The medical cabins crouched in a group, looking isolated and grim despite the summer blooming all around them.

Frankly, Hollis didn’t blame them – this wasn’t summer, this was Hell on earth. He was born and bred in the South, but the heat here was excessive. [ **I have never been to Pennsylvania. I could’ve at least done research, but no…** ]

He did have to wonder who had been possessed to situate the medical cabins, and the physicians they contained, at a distance from the soldiers. It didn’t seem very practical to him, but he supposed if he asked why, he would get back an answer involving regulations, which were becoming the bane of his life.

Schneider began to whistle as he strode through the knee-high grass toward the little row of medical cabins. It seemed oddly quiet, Hollis noted; other than Schneider’s whistling and the sound of their footsteps in the grass, there were no sounds on this side of the ridge.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, as Schneider came to the door of the first cabin. There was a letter stuck between the logs next to the doorhandle, and Schneider absently picked it up.

“Weren’t you told?” said Schneider, looking over his glasses at Hollis. “We’re the replacements. The 10th infantry lost their entire medical staff – the surgeon died just this morning. We’re to replace them in acting capacity, effective immediately.” [ **This doesn’t make any sense, but neither does the rest of this draft!** ]

Schneider glanced down at the letter in his hand. “And, according to regulations, we’re to share quarters.” [ **It’s been long enough since I wrote this to admit that, at the time, my most recent long work was an amazingly long slash fanfiction. Does it show?** ]

Hollis said exactly what came to mind – given who he was serving with, he wasn’t surprised in the least that it came in German.

“Scheisse.”

Schneider grinned, showing off that mouthful of sharp teeth once more. “I don’t believe in regulations, mein lieber Herr. Pick a cabin and put your things in it. Then come back to me – we have patients to see.”

Actually, thought Hollis as he arbitrarily picked a cabin far away from the one Schneider seemed to have chosen, that was something Schneider didn’t seem to believe in. In his world, patience was of no consequence.

Ba-dum ching. [ **That was uncalled for and unfunny.** ]

* * *

As was his wont, Hollis had begun composing that day’s letter to Adelaide well before he actually sat down to write it.

Now, though, squinting under the feeble light of a candle guttering in the dry air, he did not know where to begin.

 _My dearest Adelaide_ he had written at the top of the page; one of his carefully-preserved sheets of foolscap, pristine and untouched yet by his hand except for the salutation.

Now he was tapping his pencil’s blunt end absently against the table, wondering where to go from there.

 _My dearest Adelaide, today I watched a young man die_ , he thought. [ **Hey wow a line I don’t hate!** ]

What would she think, if that were the beginning to the next letter she received from him? No, he had to begin some other way.

_My dearest Adelaide, I may be coming home to you sooner than expected. You see, it has been brought to my attention that I received my post through a series of untruths; I was accepted as an assistant surgeon to keep Doctor Schneider in line because there are simply not enough physicians. Now the lives of nine hundred men depend on the two of us._

No, she definitely wouldn’t appreciate that.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He’d scrubbed most of the blood off of himself after Schneider dismissed him for the night, but he still felt as though there were clotting spatters of the stuff everywhere on him. Thank God they’d managed to commandeer some leftover lab coats from the previous group of surgeons – the blood would never come out of his uniform.

Who knew that an amputation would produce so much blood? [ **If you want to black out, take a shot every time Hollis is a complete idiot. He’s already participated in several surgeries by this point. Did I forget?** ] He shuddered, remembering the charnel that passed for an operating room in the tent hospital. The ground was soft with blood there, reeking and thick with flies; men lay on tables waiting for their turn under the bonesaw.

It had been an endless, blood-filled day. There had been a skirmish with the enemy fifteen miles from the camp, and these were the surviving casualties, waiting to be operated on.

Schneider had it down to an art.

Hollis and the orderly would lift the next patient from the table where he was waiting to the table where Schneider operated, and then Hollis would dose the patient with chloroform, according to the procedure which Schneider had taught him: pour from the bottle onto a dry cloth while counting; when your count is finished, apply to the patient’s nose and mouth.

By then, Schneider would have finished washing his bonesaw and scalpel clean from the last patient, and he would wait a moment or so for the chloroform to take effect before setting his blade to the shattered limb.

Schneider seemed strangely detached while he was operating; during the hours they stood in that tent he said hardly a word. The last time he’d spoken to Hollis, actually, was to give him his instructions that morning, and mostly what Hollis remembered of that was his instruction to on no account breathe in the fumes of chloroform. If he did, that was not Schneider’s problem, and Hollis would be left on the floor until he came out of it.

Hollis smiled to himself – it didn’t matter if it wouldn’t be suitable to write what he was thinking to little Adelaide. She’d married a chemist, and known what she was getting, from the inevitable stains on his linen to his inability to keep his mouth shut on the newest topic to take his fancy.

My dearest Adelaide, he looked down and read, and continued on as if he had never stopped to think it over.

_At first I was not sure whether I should write and tell you the honest truth of what has happened since I last wrote to you, but I determined at last that you would not mind such an indiscretion as my being honest with you. She would smile at that; he knew she would, whenever the letter reached her._

_Since last I wrote to you, I have been ‘shipped out’, as the phrase goes, to the camp where I will likely be spending the rest of my time in the army. They are very short of surgeons here on the front, but shorter yet of nurses; do not disclose to anyone your skill in sewing, or your patience and kindness, or you may be recruited as an army nurse._

_The shortage of surgeons is such that I find myself in training to become one; currently I am only permitted to anesthetize the patients before they are operated on, or to suture their wounds after the operation. It is likely, that given the news I have heard from the front, that I will soon be promoted to performing operations on my own, such will be the excess of men requiring a surgeon’s services._

_I keep you in my thoughts daily, my dear Addie, and I hope that you do the same for me; I may need the encouragement in the weeks to come. I and Dr. Schneider are the only medical staff currently on hand here at the camp to represent our regiment; together we are responsible for more than nine hundred souls until such time as someone else with medical ability should appear._

_I hope you are well, and remain ever your_

_Hollis_

[ **The letters, as much as I hate them, will probably have to stay – they establish Hollis’s attachment to his wife, which was meant to make it actually mean something when she died in childbirth at the mid-way point of the story.**

**[Given I never wrote that part, they just feel like I desperately needed to pad out the chapter.**

**[Also, the next chapter is much more my favorite, and I believe I’ve posted excerpts here before. It’s also really, really long…** ]


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note from 2013:
> 
> This is probably the whole chapter that I hate least, although the next one also holds up decently.
> 
> What really spoils both of them is this: remember what I said about Robin Atkin Downes voicing Valentine?
> 
> Your opinion may vary, but I find it has a tendency to spoil his long angsty soliloquys.
> 
> Also! It would be impolite of me not to warn you: from here on out there are several quite gory scenes. Please exercise caution.

“Doctor?”

Hollis appreciated the title, even though it wasn’t strictly his to use, but he did not appreciate being interrupted, even by the amputee currently serving as his orderly. He blotted the spilled ink off of the report he was supposed to have filed a week ago.

“If it’s Private Miller again,” he said, dipping his pen in the inkwell, “tell the boy he has a cold and send him away.” Miller had been in five times in the past two days, each time fretting that he was dying of whatever horror took his fancy – last time it had been cholera, which he showed no symptoms of other than lethargy, weariness, and nausea.

Oddly, all of the symptoms he _did_ show were those of nothing more deadly than the common cold.

There was silence from outside the office, and Hollis sighed. “Jenkins? Who is it?”

The door opened, hobnail boots thumped on the packed dirt of the floor, and Hollis looked up at a boy he had never expected to see again.

He mentally awarded the lad a point for bravery when Liam, instead of turning right back around, instead stepped up to Hollis’s desk, bold as brass.

“What’s the matter?” said Hollis tiredly, wiping off his pen and laying it down. He’d already seen the awkward way Liam held himself, cradling his left arm carefully and walking so as not to jounce it.

“I broke my arm, sir,” said Liam. The arm did have a rather unnatural look to it, though Hollis couldn’t be sure when it was covered by the boy’s shirtsleeve.

“How’d you do it?” He stood up and moved around the desk. “Pull up your sleeve.”

“Fell off the troop train, sir.” He unbuttoned the cuff and carefully moved it up his arm; however, the gesture was ineffective with only one hand, and Hollis tugged the cuff all the way up to his elbow.

“How did you do that?” The arm was swollen about midway between elbow and wrist.

“I tripped coming down the stairs.”

“Ah.” He gripped the boy’s arm gently, moving his thumb up along the edge of the radius towards the elbow – right where the swelling was most noticeable, he felt a discontinuity in the bone, and a bony prominence above it like the edge of a broken plate.

 _Closed fracture of the radius._  His fingers on the other side of the boy’s arm felt no abnormality of the ulna, only the smooth hardness of healthy bone under the skin.

Liam’s face was pale, but he made no attempt to pull away.

“You’ve broken one of the bones in your forearm,” Hollis said at last, removing his hands from the boy’s arm and reflexively wiping the palms on his shirtfront.

“All right,” Liam said. He seemed remarkably calm – Hollis had grown rather used to grown men screaming when told that their arm was going to have to come off, so this quiet reaction from a mere boy was… a relief, in a way. Although Liam didn’t need to have his arm hacked off, only for the bone to be splinted.

The office was made up to be a simulacrum of a ‘normal’ doctor’s office (aside from the dirt floor), with ranks of cabinets faced in wood containing medical supplies. All were marked, or Hollis wouldn’t be able to find anything – neither would anyone else, likely as not, since the supplies seemed to be organized in some obscure bureaucratic style, not in any useful manner.

“I’ll splint it and you can be on your way again,” said Hollis.

“Thank you, sir.”

The cabinets squeaked and the wood was scarred under Hollis’s hands; he moved automatically, removing a roll of bandages and a pair of wooden splints from their respective places. They were running low on bandages again, which was one of the subjects of the report he should be writing. Would be writing if it weren’t for this foolish boy with a broken arm.

_I sound like Schneider._

It wasn’t Liam’s fault he’d broken his arm; he was lucky, from one point of view, in that the fracture felt simple and would probably heal quickly and straight.

Hollis turned from the cabinets, and set down bandages and splints on his desk. “Before I can splint your arm, I have to set the bone.”

“Is this gonna hurt? Sir?” Liam sounded, for the first time in the conversation, to be somewhat afraid.

“Yes. Hold still, please,” Hollis said, as he settled his hands carefully on Liam’s arm near the break, just as Schneider had taught him.

Liam stiffened, but he didn’t jerk away or make a sound as Hollis began to gently manipulate the shattered end of the bone back into place. Lucky for him, the bone hadn’t broken through the skin, so he probably would keep the arm – an open fracture, according to Schneider (and apparently, to most non-crazy doctors), was almost surely to lead to an amputation, if not immediately, then at some point in the future. Liam’s fracture was closed, which would lower the chance of its getting infected.

Hollis held the bone in place for a moment, persuading himself that it wouldn’t shift back if he took his hands off for a moment.

He wrapped one hand around Liam’s thin arm and lifted a scrap of cotton cloth from the desk; it wasn’t perfect, but it would keep the splints from chafing too badly. Apparently this was important. He laid the cloth along the length of Liam’s forearm, again absurdly fearful that his careful manipulation of the broken bone would be undone if he took his hands off of the boy.

He took a breath and lifted his hands away, reaching for the splints, one of which he slipped into Liam’s other hand.

“Liam.”

“Yes sir?” The boy opened his eyes, which he had squeezed shut when Hollis began to shift the bone back into place.

“You’ll need to hold the splints in place while I wrap your arm.”

“Yes sir.”

He seemed to have gotten a serious attitude adjustment since the last time they’d seen each other, Hollis reflected as he laid the splints against Liam’s arm. He was just as talkative, but he’d gotten a lot more respectful – or a lot better at faking respect.

Hollis wound the bandage about Liam’s arm and tied it off in a tidy knot. He’d used as little as he felt safe doing, given that the lad didn’t really need the bandages to soak up oozing pus or anything, only to hold the splints in place while his arm healed.

“That’s all,” he said, brushing his hands against his shirt. “Keep it on for a month at least or the bone won’t heal. Come back then and we’ll see how you’re doing.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Liam, looking a little woozy as he tugged his shirtsleeve down over the splint – it fit, but the cuff wouldn’t button.

Liam stood for a moment, presumably getting his bearings, and then moved for the door. Hollis leaned on the desk and watched him go, not wanting to sit back down just yet.

On the threshold, or what passed for one, the boy turned around, and Hollis prepared for him to get chatty again.

Those dark green eyes were wide and innocent, though. “Say – you look familiar, mister. Are you from Illinois, down Green’s Town way?”

“I’m from Georgia, son,” said Hollis, relieved at not being recognized (perhaps it was the surgeon’s uniform he was wearing), and somewhat satisfied at being able to turn around the diminutive that had been used on him all his life.

“Oh. Sorry, sir.” Lacking a cap with a brim to tug in deference (must have left it with his kit, wherever he’d left it – which meant that he’d had the courage, after breaking his arm, to stop and leave his kit somewhere), he settled for a salute. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Hollis, and moved back around the desk to settle into his chair – it was bare wood, but welcoming compared to the prospect of hours on his feet in the surgery or seeing patients. Thankfully, with some of the amputees recovering and capable of light work, he and Schneider had been able to put them into service as nurses for the others who were still bedbound.

Still, he made a point of keeping up with the latest news on troop movements via Schneider (who regularly spoke with the colonel and the other regimental brass); it was in his best interests to know if he needed to expect a potentially large number of casualties in the next few days.

Hollis rubbed at his forehead; he was young and energetic compared to Schneider [ **Note unrelated to snarky commentary: they’re actually separated by only four years, but Valentine has been dramatically aged by his tragic backstory.** ] , but he could feel his patience wearing away each day at this work. Oh, splinting broken arms and diagnosing colds he could handle, but hours of surgery with blood griming under his fingernails and clots drying on his arms… that was nothing he looked forward to in the mornings when he woke.

There was a knock at the door, and a shrilling, all-too-familiar voice.

“Herr Downey! Come to the surgery at once!”

If it had been Jenkins, telling him that Doctor Schneider was asking for him in the surgery at his convenience, he would have lingered a moment over his report.

If it had been Schneider asking him to come to the surgery in a calm and level voice, he would have got up and left with the man.

But Schneider sounded not angry, but… something else. Panicked, perhaps? Whatever it was, Hollis had never heard it before.

Hollis shot out of his chair and bolted for the door.

* * *

Schneider swished his hands back and forth in the bowl of dirty water, then wiped them dry on his lab coat, looking pensively toward the gaping wound Hollis was currently wrist-deep in.

“Have you found the bullet yet?”

“No,” said Hollis, wiggling his fingers past a slippery loop of bowel. It had to be in here somewhere, since it hadn’t come clean out the other side.

His index finger brushed against a solid lump of something warm and hard; he gently coaxed it from its hiding place and…

“Found it.” He pulled his hand out of the man’s guts with a wet sucking sound (thankfully, he was unconscious; Schneider had been saving chloroform for weeks in the case of something like this happening) and dropped the bullet onto the floor. He shook some of the blood from his fingers, watching it spatter and soak into the dirt.  _Christ._

“Good. Rinse off your hands.”

Hollis stepped gratefully away from the prone man on the table and rinsed his hands off as best he could in the shallow dish of water (which promptly turned an ugly shade of pale red with clots floating in it).

He turned around and Schneider had his hand in the same guts Hollis had just had his in.

“What on earth are you doing?” The first rule of Schneider was to never question him, but Hollis figured he was safe because what he was doing didn’t make any sense and he didn’t have any sharp objects on him at the time.

“Straightening out his gut,” Schneider said, his hand moving back and forth. “If you caused it to knot while you were looking for the bullet, the bowel will die. And so will he.”

 _As if he’s going to live through having had my hands in him_ , Hollis thought, but was more than wise enough to say. [ **Once again, Hollis is playing the part of enormous idiot. However, it is true that at this point in time abdominal surgery had a very low success rate, probably not aided by the fact that yes, it was common practice to fish around bullet wounds for the bullet with unsterilized hands. Which is occasionally said to have been what really killed James Garfield, who was shot about six years after the time of this story.** ]

Schneider removed his hand and wiped it dry on his coat, leaving a splotch that, judging by the other faded patches of maroon on the coat, wasn’t going to come out terribly fast. “Would you like to sew him up, or shall I?”

Hollis glanced at the wound, assessing it in terms of how fast he could suture it. “I’ll do it.” It wouldn’t hurt to show off to Schneider that he had well improved his suturing speed.

“Don’t let me stop you, fraulein.” Schneider produced a pad of cloth from somewhere and swiped the blood away from the wound, then stepped out of Hollis’s way. Unusually considerate of him; perhaps it was the fact that this was the last patient of the day.

Hollis knew better than to respond; he picked up a needle, threaded it, and set to work, holding the torn and ragged edges of the wound together with his fingers as he sewed. There was blood caking under his fingernails and in the creases of his skin – it would take quite a bit of scrubbing until he felt clean again.

As he’d half-expected, Schneider had his pocket watch out and was quietly timing Hollis’s progress. He gritted his teeth and kept sewing as calmly as he could. No use getting upset over Schneider’s habits.

“Two minutes eleven,” said Schneider as Hollis tied off the final suture. “Very good. He may even survive.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose with the back of his hand. “Now, would you kindly go find Herr Jenkins?”

“Of course,” said Hollis. There was really no other response with Schneider – you  _could_  say no to him, but you never knew what he’d do in response. Bonesaw to the face? Possible. A harrumph of mild dissatisfaction before going to do the job himself? Equally possible.

It was safer to just do what the doctor ordered.

He wiped his hands of the remaining blood (well, what hadn’t dried fast to his skin, anyway) on the cloth Schneider had used to dab away the patient’s blood, and stepped into the hall. “Jenkins?”

“Right here, doctor.” The surgery was a few steps away from the main medical tent, and Jenkins was lingering silently between the two, smoking a cigarette. He was a burly Irishman, and unless you looked down you’d have wondered why he was an orderly at all. [ **Instead of on the front lines.** ]

If you  _did_  look down, you’d see immediately that he was missing his left leg from mid-calf down, and that it had been replaced by a crudely whittled wooden peg. He was ineligible for combat, but more than capable of the grunt work that comprised an orderly’s day. [ **I still haven’t verified this, and I really should.** ]

“We need you,” Hollis said.

“That’s usually the case.” He dropped his cigarette to the ground, where it smoldered quietly before he stubbed it out with the boot on his whole leg. “Poor bastard die?”

“Not yet. But we’re done with him, so you’ve got to move him to the main tent, find him a bed there.”

“Right.” He cracked his knuckles. “You got a stretcher, make it easier on me?”

“Ambulance corps stole all of ours yesterday,” Hollis replied. “He’s small, you can carry him.”

“Aye, of course I can,” said Jenkins. “Having a stretcher and someone else to help carry it just makes it easier. Is he the last one today?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.” He tugged his sagging slouch cap down further on his forehead and stepped toward the surgery.

Hollis turned and stepped back inside; Jenkins followed in his wake.

Schneider had taken a few steps toward cleaning up the mess, but it was still rather like a butcher’s shop, as opposed to a clean place of science. Jenkins didn’t react at all, and hadn’t from the first day Schneider had pronounced him cured enough to serve as an orderly – as far as blood, guts, and gore, the surgery, next to the battlefield, was clean and shiny new.

Even given that, Schneider looked like something from a penny novel – soaked in blood, cold eyes gleaming from behind glasses whose lenses were themselves also spotted with blood, his lab coat [ **Technically, they should both be wearing surgeon’s gowns in the old-fashioned style.** ]nhanging loose around him. At least he wasn’t holding a bonesaw.

“Hello, Herr Jenkins,” he said mildly, and took off his glasses to polish them clean of the blood on a relatively clean corner of his coat. When he put them back on, Hollis saw that all he’d really accomplished was to smear the blood around.

Jenkins nodded. “Hello, Doc.” The orderly was the only one permitted to refer to Schneider as such – Hollis suspected it was because Jenkins was more than capable of throwing Schneider across the room if he felt like it, not because Schneider was fond of the man or anything.

“We’re quite done with Mister Anderson,” Schneider said, his voice quite calm and at odds with the sheer volume of blood on and around him. “I’d be much obliged if you would… remove him.”

“Sure.” The Irishman bent slightly and scooped up the patient in his arms – Anderson was still out cold, and Hollis estimated he wouldn’t wake yet for an hour or so. Or if he did, he wouldn’t want to be awake.

“Jenkins?” Hollis stopped him before he could get out of the surgery.

“Yes, doctor?”

“Check on Mister Anderson once he wakes up, will you?”

Jenkins nodded; with Anderson slumped in his arms, head rolled back on his neck, he looked like some sort of ghoul carrying off his latest victim. How fitting. “Sure.”

“Thank you,” said Hollis, and stepped out of his way.

Once Jenkins had gone, Schneider sighed with relief and began stripping off his coat – he was practically soaked from the shoulders down, the coat hanging heavy with the weight of the blood absorbed by the fabric. The material of the coat itself had an odd slick look to it in places where the blood was still tacky.

Schneider’s face twisted in a grimace as he peeled the coat away from his flesh and flung it down – a little dry earth wouldn’t really effect its overall filthiness much at this point. “Widerlich,” [ **“Disgusting.”** ] he hissed, clenching his hands into fists.

After accompanying Schneider for nearly a month, [ **This timespan should be** _much_ **longer given the demonstrated change in their relationship and Hollis’s attitude towards his position, I think.** ] Hollis felt a little safer hazarding his opinion unsolicited. He did this now.

“The blood will come right off if you soak it in the creek,” he said; he had learned that cold water helped soak out blood long ago, in the midst of a very… active childhood.

“Was?” Schneider’s head snapped up, and he fixed Hollis with a full-on glare, though he didn’t seem murderously angry so much as he seemed, say, like a wet cat – irritated by his circumstances.

“If you let that coat soak in the creek a while the blood’ll come off easier when you scrub it.”

Schneider sighed and rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. “Danke.” He adjusted his glasses and stepped away from the coat crumpled on the floor, nudging it distastefully with his boot. “Abdominal wounds are so…  _messy_ , are they not?” His lip curled in disgust. “That we should have to spill so much blood in the name of healing – it disgusts me.”

Hollis made no reply, figuring that it was best to let Schneider talk to himself if that was what he needed.

But he did take off his own coat – given that Anderson was the last patient of the day, he no longer needed to wear it as a marker of his being an assistant surgeon. Besides, he was almost as blood-covered as Schneider, and while he could stand having the filthy rag on him for as long as necessary – it was no longer necessary. So off it came.

He dropped it on top of Schneider’s coat on the floor, and for a moment Schneider looked almost grateful. Odd. The man had no qualms about putting his hands wrist-deep into a man’s guts, or sawing off limbs, but a bloody lab coat unnerved him.

Schneider ran a hand through his hair and forced a smile. “Will you join me for a brandy?”

“I’d be glad to,” said Hollis. He wouldn’t deny Schneider his company if he asked for it… and besides, from the state of his own nerves, he could judge that Schneider needed a drink as much as he did.

“I’ll be in my cabin in half an hour,” Schneider said. He glanced at Hollis in a way that made him immediately aware that his hands to the wrists were covered in blood, with splotches of the stuff up to his elbows. “Shall I expect you?”

_You just asked me._

Well, judging from the way he was behaving, and the way the day had gone, his nerves were probably a little frayed.

“I’ll be there.”

“Excellent.” Schneider departed post haste.

Hollis grinned to himself – typically, Schneider had left him with the mess. Well. It was only dirty laundry.

He slopped the contents of the hand-washing bowl out onto the dirt, set the scalpels back in the tray, and gathered up the dirty cloths they’d used during the surgery. Usually the work of washing out whatever they’d dirtied fell to a nurse or an orderly – but it was late, and Hollis was going to have to rinse the coats anyway.

He blew out the Blau lamp [ **If it were the real world 1875 they’d probably be using a small kerosene lamp – however, due to reasons in the backstory, kerosene lamps are not available. So they’re using a small alcohol-burning lamp instead.** ] they’d been using to make it easier to see during the surgery (although not much easier, given the flickering, uncertain quality of its light), and stepped out into the night.

* * *

“I scrubbed my hands until they were almost raw,” Hollis said quietly, staring at the offending appendages, “but I don’t feel any cleaner than I did when they were covered in that man’s blood.”

Schneider inhaled deeply. “That… is  _exactly_  how I feel, Hollis – may I call you Hollis?”

He had just put his glass to his lips, but lowered it immediately to respond to Schneider. “Of course you may.”

“Then you may call me Valentine.” He grinned and lifted his glass – there was still blood ground into his cuticles and under his fingernails, making a grotesque picture against the clean glass and brandy within. “Here’s to the man in whose blood we are steeped tonight – wir werden laenger tot als lebendig [ **"We’ll be longer dead than living.”** ]. Prost!“

Hollis clinked his glass against Schneider’s. "Prost.”

However moody Schneider might be tonight, he did have one thing going for him – his secret stash of brandy. Not so secret now, but still, brandy was brandy no matter the provenance or secrecy.

He had once prided himself on having a Southern gentleman’s ability to hold his liquor, and so he attributed his state to the fact that he was overworked, overtired, and overstressed.

Honestly, he was on the way to drunk – not a gentlemanly state of being, but he could put up with it for the moment.

“You are married, yes?”

 _The ring would indicate so._  “I am.”  _Addie, Addie, Addie,_  he mused – what would she think if she saw him here? Would she forgive him, dismiss it as boys being boys? He rather thought she would. She loved him, after all.

Schneider looked sorrowful, and the expression was incongrous on his cruel face; the eyes like chips of ice didn’t suit themselves to looking mournful, and the hard mouth looked odd not smirking or curled in contempt. “I am not. You will have a reason to go home – a reason to want to live and leave the army. I have nothing, Hollis.”

That couldn’t be true, strictly – he had to have a dog or something.

Hollis mulled it over, taking a mouthful of brandy from his glass as Schneider gazed past him at a point somewhere beyond the wall of the cabin. He knew little about the other man’s background, only that he was German and had been a surgeon on the other side of the war for a time.

So, presuming that Schneider had a home at all, it was on the other side of the world, across thousands of miles of ocean and territory foreign to him. Whatever he did have at home was far away from here.  _Out of sight, out of mind._

“All I have is my work – bullet wounds and broken legs, tch. I could do so much more in a real hospital, Hollis, but here I am in a filthy provincial hellhole instead. And I can’t save them, not with these tools, not under these pressures.” He trailed off, eyes fixed on his hands as if they held the answer to whatever questions he was posing himself.

“No one can save everyone,” he said.

“I know,” Schneider said miserably. “But I can’t save any of them.” He clenched his hands into fists, digging his blunt nails into his palms. “They all die, and the more of them die the longer this war drags on, and the longer the war is the longer until I can leave this place, and if I have to stay here much longer with these – these  _schweinhunden_  – I will  _lose my mind._ ” He slammed one fist into the table, which jumped visibly at the impact.

Hollis remained silent, not daring to move except to let out a breath.

Schneider ground his fist into the table, squeezing the fingers of his other hand more tightly, looking dully at the hand on the table even as blood began to ooze from the other. “I could not do this without you,” he whispered. “Say you will not leave.”

“I won’t leave,” said Hollis hollowly. Here was the Schneider he knew, full of rage and unpredictable – but for the first time, frightening.

“Promise me you won’t leave,” he said, his voice almost a groan as blood began to drip from his hand to the floor. “We’ll stay together, hmm? Heal the poor Hurensoehne to the best of our abilities, try to keep ourselves alive.” He jerked his head up, seeming to force his gaze away from the hand curled whitely on the table to Hollis – now his eyes seemed to burn with some sort of purpose, a fearful determination. “Promise me, Hollis.” His hand clenched even more tightly, blood streaming from it to the dirt below. “Promise me!”

“I – I promise, Valentine.” His Christian name sounded so  _odd_ , so  _soft_  – Schneider was a much sharper name, much more fitting of this man so like the blade of the surgical tools he wielded, sharp and unforgiving.

“Good.” He slammed his hand against the table again, making his brandy jump in its forgotten glass, glared at his hand unseeingly for a moment.

Hollis sat at the table uncomfortably and took another sip from his brandy – as fuzzy-warm as the alcohol made him, he was coming to the point of high-tailing it out of the cabin without looking back.

Schneider looked up at him, and the eyes that had been blade-sharp chips of ice a moment before suddenly looked mild and quite human. “I think it would be wise for you to leave now, Hollis,” he said, his voice even. “I am overtired, I think, and I am sure you could also use your sleep tonight. And I cannot be responsible for myself if you remain, I believe.” He stood, and for a moment Hollis saw how short he was in comparison; Schneider stood a head taller than him when he wasn’t slumped in irritation.

Hollis stood as well, depositing his empty glass on the rough wood of the table. “Thank you for your hospitality, Valentine.” With the drink he felt his too-familiar country-Georgia accent putting a fur on his tongue. “We’ll see each other tomorrow?”

Schneider forced his hands to uncurl, his face still and emotionless though blood dripped from the one and the joints of the other creaked as it opened. “It’s Sunday, mein Freund – sleep, and perhaps we’ll see each other later that day. Unless you plan to  _attend_  church; I do my praying in private…” He cut himself off, clasping his hands together. “Well. At any rate, we shall see each other on Monday. Good night, Hollis.”

“Good night,” he said, and turned his back on Schneider, his brandy, and his curious brand of debauchery.

[ **There are actually several hints scattered throughout this chapter as to Valentine’s actual backstory, and a couple about Hollis’s youth and background. I won’t tell you what Valentine’s backstory is yet, but I will tell you that Hollis comes from “new money”, the son of a merchant, and wasn’t raised in the way typical of upper-class children of his time. I did a not-bad job of hinting at this, though I sure could’ve made it more blatant.**

[ **Overall, though this chapter suffers from some weaknesses, it is still relatively strong so far as fleshing out Valentine’s character – and while I am still of the mind that this story arc is about Valentine’s development, it is _also_  about Hollis, who received regretfully little attention in this draft.**

[ **However, this chapter and the next hang a lot of their effectiveness on the believability of the emotion conveyed. Which drops severely when you start reading all Valentine’s lines as The Medic…]**


	6. Chapter 6

This had to be some kind of blasphemy.

Or something like that, anyway; it had been a long time since Hollis had anything more than a surface acquaintance with the details of religion, but he was fairly sure that being awoken early on Sunday morning by a loud knock on the door ranked among the venial sins at the very least. [ **Is it venal or venial? What’s the HTML code for bold text? I have so many questions.** ]

He rolled out of bed and went for the door.

_Am I wearing pants? Yes. Yes, I’m wearing pants._

He yanked the door open.

Jenkins had blood on his shirt (always with the blood,  _always_  the blood).

 _It’s Sunday_.

“What is it?”

“Something’s wrong with that Anderson fellow,” Jenkins said. He pointed left with his thumb, indicating Schneider’s cabin. “Tried to get the doc to help, but he just shoved a bonesaw in me face and told me to get out.”

“What’s the matter with Anderson?” said Hollis. If he was complaining about pain – well, that was just too bad. If it were something else… it might actually be Hollis’s problem.[ **I’m divided on whether or not Hollis should be able to guess by all that fucking blood that the problem involves Anderson’s blood, but he probably has an amazing hangover. Or at least that’s the excuse I’d use.** ]

“Hacking up blood,” Jenkins said. “I might not have come, but he asked me to get one of the doctors, so…” He shrugged.

Fine.

He shoved his feet into his boots, not bothering with puttees [ **Please read: “leg-wrappy thingies I don’t know what they’re called”.** ], and shrugged on a clean-looking shirt (as clean as anything ever got around here, anyway – Christ almighty, he’d left the lab coats in the creek all night, hadn’t he?). Then it occurred to him.

“Why were you on duty? You _do_ have Sunday off.”

Jenkins shrugged again, and lit a cigarette. “Nothing to do, no reason to go sit on a pew for two hours on a morning like this.”

 _So you go wander among the dying and the sick._ And he’d seemed so normal, too. [ **There is no one “normal” in the entire cast. Except maybe Liam.** ]

Hollis sighed as he finished buttoning the minimum socially acceptable amount of buttons on his shirt. “I’ll have a look, and then you can go get yourself a coffee, Mister Jenkins. Work is for the other six days of the week.”

“Whatever you say, doctor.” [ **Hollis’s middle name is “No One Knows He’s Not Really A Doctor”, and I’m running out of sassy commentary.** ]

Hollis sniffed in distaste and stormed off up the hill, heading for the tent hospital and his patient.

* * *

_Well, he’s conscious_ , Hollis thought, looking at the man curled up on the cot, one fevered hand twitching on the counterpane, the other curled protectively around his stomach. [ **Go ahead and guess what condition I started painstakingly setting up the symptoms of – it was going to kill Anderson in about five chapters’ time.** ]

Hollis felt even less professional than usual, not even wearing a lab coat, uniform trousers hanging loose around his ankles, nothing to indicate he was supposed to be  _treating_  people. [ **Take a shot for too many italics.**.]

He squared his shoulders and stepped forward, summoning up confidence like a protective shield around him. “Mister Anderson?”

No response. There was a little puddle of blood on the dingy counterpane where he’d drooled; Anderson swallowed and coughed weakly.

Hollis reached out and touched Anderson’s shoulder. “Mister Anderson, are you all right?”

“You don’t _sound_ like a Kraut,” said Anderson in a low whisper. [ **The context for this line was never written so I’ll explain: when the camp surgeon is a captured German, word tends to get around, and Schneider was supposed to be a figure of derision and semi-legend among some of the men. Also, I don’t recall ever mentioning it, but should it come up, if somebody in this piece calls something Dutch, they mean “Deutsch”, for the same reason we call it “Pennsylvania Dutch”.** ]

“I’m a doctor, Mister Anderson. My colleague tells me you’re feeling ill; if you are, it’s my duty to treat you.”

“You ain’t a Kraut, are you?” He uncurled slightly and turned his head to squint up at Hollis.

Oh, he could just about  _see_  Jenkins grinning at him from behind his back. “I am not. You’re in a Union Army hospital, Mister Anderson.”

“What happened to me?” A drop of blood dribbled slowly down his face from lip all the way to jawline, leaving a smeary red trail behind. Hollis noticed an unstitched laceration that split his right eyebrow in half; it wasn’t deep enough to really worry about, given that about twelve hours ago Hollis had had his hand in the man’s intestines.

“I can’t tell you,” Hollis said. He had no idea, except that someone had fired a rifle in the direction of Anderson and failed to hit him in an immediately fatal way. “You were shot in the stomach – we had to operate to remove the bullet.”

“Thanks, doc,” said Anderson. He blinked, and the wound on his eyebrow pulled open slightly, showing the pink interior. “Say, I’m thirsty – can I have some water while you’re here?” [ **Most of Anderson’s dialogue now rings tinny to my ear, but I did try.** ]

“Of course.” He poured off a cup from the pitcher on the bedside table. The surgery might be a tent and the hospital might have a dirt floor, but damn if they didn’t have some civilized trappings.

Hollis set the tin cup down on the table and slipped an arm under Anderson’s shoulders, gently bringing him up from his horizontal position. He brought the cup to Anderson’s lips and let him take it in shallow mouthfuls; he wasn’t sure what Schneider would have done, he reflected, but giving the man something to drink was  _probably_  harmless.

“Thanks, doc,” Anderson said when he finished the cup.

Hollis set the cup back on the table with a little clatter. “You’re welcome. Now–”

Anderson’s hand flew to his throat suddenly, and he made a gagging sound, his face twisting with pain and nausea before he vomited a fountain of bright red blood onto Hollis’s shirtfront. [ **It should either be dark red and partially-digested, or somebody missed a wound to his lung while examining him. This entire draft should’ve just been subtitled “I’ll Write What I Want To And Accuracy Can Go Fuck Itself”.** ]

 _At least this one was army issue_ , Hollis thought with disgust. [ **Christ almighty man, this is neither the time nor the place for sassy commentary.** ]

“Jenkins,” he said softly, “will you get some extra pillows for Mister Anderson, please? We’ve got to keep him upright.”

“Yes, doctor.” Jenkins moved for the supply cabinet, and Hollis tried not to think about the blood slowly drying on his shirt. (Oh, God, he felt spots of it on his  _face_ too, and a splatter on his neck – good Lord, how could a man lose so much blood and still live?) [ **Hollis does not actually know how much blood the human body contains. I don’t think he figured it out at any point in this draft. The answer is: a lot. Holy shit, it’s everywhere.** ]

Anderson made a wet choking noise, and more blood drooled from his mouth; Hollis wiped it away with his shirtsleeve. The garment was going to need a long soak in cold water anyway, and a little more blood wouldn’t change that.

Jenkins returned with pillows, which he stuffed behind Anderson with remarkable speed.

“Thank you,” Hollis said, and let the sick man slump back onto the pillows, still dribbling bright blood from his mouth. He wiped away this new appearance with a cleaner section of his sleeve, almost absently. “You should be quite all right, Mister Anderson,” he said as the man gurgled and gasped next to him. “This is a normal post-surgery complication, and you’ll be right as rain in no time. Jenkins?”

“Yes?” He looked a little rattled, for some reason. [ **Ha very ha.** ]

“If Mister Anderson keeps spitting blood, please get him a bowl – there should be some you can use in my office, in the appropriate cabinet.” He rubbed his hands together, flaking some of the drying blood off and letting it fall to the dirt. [ **It should still be tacky, and I regret that I know this from experience.** ] “I am going to go back to my cabin – if you need me, that is where I will be.”

“Sure thing, doc,” Jenkins muttered, as Hollis strode past him and out of the tent.

Once he was out of Jenkins’s line of sight, Hollis hurried up and made a beeline for the medical cabins, cursing whoever had put them so damn far from the hospital.

He hurried past the church (they were singing hymns inside, something he didn’t recognize [ **I should’ve just picked a random hymn; why was I so lazy?** ]) and quickened his step as he ascended the ridge. The key was to just keep moving – if he let himself stop he was going to rethink this, and then he might have metaphorical blood on his hands to add to the literal blood that he could never quite wash away.

He skidded down the other side of the ridge, stopping himself before he slammed headlong into the door of Schneider’s cabin from sheer momentum. [ **In an alternate version of this scene he just eats shit in the mud. Go Hollis go.** ]

 _Oh Lord, didn’t Jenkins say he had a bonesaw?_  [ **And he should be keeping it in the surgery instead of taking it home.** ]

He wouldn’t kill his own assistant, though, would he? Even Schneider had limits.

Hollis knocked on the door.

“Was ist das?” He heard banging on the other side of the door, and then Schneider jerked it open. He was shirtless and barefoot, uniform trousers sagging about his hips, bonesaw dangling from the fingers of one hand. His glasses were askew, his normally-groomed hair a tangled mess, and he looked Hollis up and down, sneering. “Was wollen du?”[ **The literal dialogue is “What is it?” and “What do you want?” but I find it a little more honest to my intent if you just imagine it’s “The fuck is it?” and “What the fuck do you want?”** ]

Hollis wanted badly to come up with something simple and compelling, but found himself tongue-tied as Schneider paced forward.

“Wessen Blut ist das? Ist es Ihnen?” [ **“Whose blood is this? Is it yours?”** ]The bonesaw brushed against Hollis’s thigh as Schneider leaned forward and gripped his chin in the powerful fingers of his other hand. He peered at Hollis’s face, ice-chip eyes glassy and blank of emotion. “Sind du verletzt?” [ **“Are you hurt?”** ]

His breath smelled like brandy, and there was a smear of maroon over one cheekbone.

Hollis forced himself to remain coherent and not run off gibbering into the summer morning. So. English is probably not the best of ideas. “Nein,” he said, searching frantically for words. “Ich bin nicht verletzt. Das Blut gehoert zu unseren Patient.” [ **“No. I’m not hurt. The blood is our patient’s.”** ]

Schneider raised the bonesaw and tapped the blunt side against Hollis’s neck, still gripping his jaw tightly. “Sind du sicher, du bist nicht weh?” he purred, hefting the heavy saw without obvious effort. [ **“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” although to really get what I was going for, please imagine this entire scene to a background of bad 70s porn music.** ]

“Ja, ich bin sicher,” Hollis said, finding a reservoir of calm within himself, but not a reservoir of German. “Koennen wir Englische sprechen, bitte?” [ **“Yes, I’m sure. Can we please speak English?”** ]

“Ja,” Schneider sighed, dropping the bonesaw from Hollis’s neck, “fuer dich will ich sprechen Englische.” [ **“Yes. For you, I’ll speak English.”** ] He let go of Hollis’s jaw, but didn’t step back at all; when he spoke he puffed alcohol breath into Hollis’s face. “So. Mister Anderson is not well?”

“Are you  _drunk_?” Hollis snapped, relieved that Schneider seemed to be in a better mood for English. He backtracked. “He vomited blood on me – you tell me if he’s  _well_.”

Schneider stepped back slightly. His eyes narrowed. “Did you do anything, give him anything?”

“I gave him  _water_ ,” Hollis said, “but I doubt that’s the problem – half an hour ago Jenkins came to me saying that Anderson was spitting blood and wanted me to come investigate.”

Schneider nodded, a stiff bob of the head that seemed oddly unnatural compared to his usual lithe movements. “Why did Jenkins not come to me?”

Hollis couldn’t keep a little smirk from his lips. “Apparently you threatened to take a bonesaw to him.”

Schneider waved one hand negligently – thankfully, it was the one without the bonesaw. “I hate that man. And mornings, I hate mornings. But Sunday is my day off, lieber Mann, I have told him a thousand times, and still he comes to me whenever one of those babies cries for his mamma.” The corner of his mouth drew down into a scowl. “Ach. It is my day of rest, I tell him again and again, and they can wait until Monday to die.”

He seemed to lose track of his thoughts, and frowned vacantly at nothing. His fingers tightened around the handle of the bonesaw, then loosened so that it dangled on the verge of plunging to the floor.

 _If he kills me,_  Hollis thought in a fit of lucidity,  _they’ll send my wages to Addie. At least some good would come of it_.

Schneider seemed to come back to himself all of a sudden, and bared his sharp teeth in a grin. “Ah. Yes. The water probably did him no harm, but I wouldn’t do it again. Given that you’ve volunteered yourself for Sunday duty… if he is hungry, give him broth, or a little hardtack perhaps. Nothing heavy, but I trust your judgment.”

He turned and threw the bonesaw on the table, as if he were flinging down a book or a jacket rather than something sharp enough to saw through a femur in twenty seconds. “Is that all, Hollis?”

The fight went out of Hollis, if it had ever been there. “Yes. That’s all – Valentine.” [ **The chapter should really end here, I think, but I kept noodling on for the better part of a page.** ]

 _Aren’t you a doctor?_  he wanted to ask.  _Don’t you want to know what’s wrong with Anderson? I thought you would want to save people, not stand by and let them die._

And then, as the German’s lips curled into that shark-like smile again, he had a flash of the night before; Schneider’s desperate snarl, his hand dripping blood on the floor –  _I can’t save any of them, Hollis._

His mouth went dry.

Schneider’s smile – if you could call it a smile – faded, sharp teeth disappearing behind his lips. “Then you may leave, Hollis. Or stay, if you like.”

Hollis ran like the devil himself was on his heels.

* * *

There was one good thing to be said of the army-issue lab coats: a night in the creek hadn’t done them any damage, at least not any Hollis could see. They were soaking wet and cold as ice as he began to draw them in a tangle from the water, but they did look a little whiter.

The water began to soak into his shirt, and he dropped the coats back into the creek with a splash. The shirt was itself bloody – it would be useless to get that on the coats after taking such care to get them clean. If dumping them in a creek out back of his cabin really counted as care in the first place.

He skinned out of the shirt, peeling it away from his skin where it had begun to stick, and let it fall to the ground. He’d have to soak it in the creek and scrub the blood out just as with the coats, but that could wait.

Shirt removed, he crouched down and drew the coats from the creek again, untangling one from the other as best as he could; they were cold and wet and very much inclined to stick to each other despite his efforts. At last he managed to get one entirely separate from the other – it appeared to be Schneider’s, given the ground-in bloodstains that twelve hours in cold water hadn’t loosened. Hollis’s own lab coat lay sadly in the creek, arms waving in the current, but under the lens of water, it at least looked much cleaner than Schneider’s.

 _I don’t have any soap_ , he realized as he absently folded the sodden mass over his arm. No matter – any soap he’d be able to get here would be little better than a long soak in the creek anyway. (He wondered absently if he might be able to make some of his own soap, save himself a little money and get his linen cleaner at the same time – but no, he was too busy already handling work and Schneider being insane and fitting in sleep somewhere in between the two to worry about making  _soap_.)

He wrung the coat out with brisk twists, already thinking of the letter he was going to write to Addie.

_Dear Addie, I am coming home post-haste, since I have entirely exhausted my stock of German and have recently discovered that my superior is fit only for Bedlam, and not in a supervisory capacity…_


	7. Chapter 7

The next morning, Hollis was as prepared as any man could be to be woken by a pounding on the door and a voice calling for him; he was mostly dressed with his hand on the doorknob before he was quite conscious of having got out of bed.

He had the door wholly open before Schneider had time to bang on it again, leaving the German with his hand poised to strike the weathered wood.

“Are you ready to go?” said Schneider. He had the catlike talent of never seeming surprised unless he wanted you to think he was.

“Where am I going and what am I doing?” Hollis buttoned the final button on his shirt, and ran a hand through his hair, badly in need of cutting at two months since the last time he’d seen a barber. (Looking back, he really should have gotten his hair cut before he’d left Foxgrove. [ **In case I didn’t mention it earlier, yes, that’s the name of his home town.** ])

“Acquiring supplies for the Union Army.” Schneider’s lip twitched. “In civilian terms, we’ve been given warning to expect major casualties before the week is out. [ **Do you know how much I knew about the actual workings of the Union Army at the time? Nothing. I made it all up.** ] As such, I requested and received dispensation to leave the hospital and expand our resources. I expect you to keep up with me at all times; I am not responsible if you get yourself killed. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”  _I didn’t sign up for this_.

Schneider eyed him critically, then sighed and drew a pistol from its holster at his waist. He brought it to eye-level and sighted down the barrel at the ridge for a moment, then turned back to Hollis and offered it to him, holding it by the barrel.

Hollis took the gun – there was no tasteful way, he felt, to reject an offering of such caliber [ **Yes, I seriously wrote that, I’m sorry** ] – and, after remembering that he didn’t wear or own a holster, tucked it into the pocket of his frock coat. Summer was fading into autumn, and the morning was dry and chill – for once, he thought he might not suffocate in the heavy wool before casting it off for his lab coat. [ **There was actually a distinct amount of time that was supposed to pass during the telling of this story. Trouble was, I never wrote down how much it was or exactly when the story started.** ]

“The first chamber isn’t loaded,” Schneider said, eyes still trained on Hollis and unblinking. “You’ll have to spin the cylinder to get a cartridge, but I trust you’re capable of that. I wouldn’t advise doing that unless I tell you.” He blinked, and a faint smile appeared on his face, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Wouldn’t want you shooting your foot off.” [ **I know as much about guns as I do about the Union Army.** ]

“Thank you,” said Hollis, dipping one hand into his pocket and almost flinching when he felt cold metal instead of the soft lining of the pocket. He kept his hand inside the pocket, knowing that jerking it out straightaway would look odd, and curled the fingers away from the cold metal of the gun. “Is that all?”

“It is.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “Now, if you would follow me, bitte.”

* * *

 

Hollis followed Schneider through the forest, boots crunching in the undergrowth. He was vaguely thankful for the run of dry weather in recent days; crunching through fallen leaves was irritating, but having to extract himself from mud with every step would have been far worse.

Schneider seemed to make no noise as he walked, slipping between trees so smoothly that the branches barely shuddered as they eased back into place; next to him Hollis felt like an ox, crashing through patches of blackberry bush, catching his trousers on thorns and sharp pieces of broken wood, and generally making more noise than he would’ve thought possible.

It was thoroughly odd, when he thought about it - Schneider had probably spent a large period of his life in industrial, citified Germany, where Hollis had grown up in the woods and hollows of western Georgia. And yet Schneider slipped through the woods like a shadow, while Hollis crashed along behind him. [ **This was all very clumsy foreshadowing, and also an example of inconsistent treatment of Hollis’s backstory. Some of these chapters I wrote very quickly, and some I picked at sentence-by-sentence for months. Both strategies resulted in low-level disaster for consistency.** ]

Schneider stopped short all of a sudden, and Hollis nearly ran straight into him. He caught himself on a tree, rough bark digging into his palms, and waited for the German to explain himself.

Schneider adjusted his glasses (a curiously civilized [ **Guys look! Guys, I read** _1984_ **! Guys!** ] gesture in the depths of a forest, and an almost amusing one considering the little twigs and leaves clinging to his clothes), consulted his watch, and set off through the forest in the direction of what looked like a clearing, or at least a gap in the trees.

Hollis listened for a moment – Schneider was still silent, but he could swear he heard footsteps somewhere close by. He stood with his hand on the tree, trying to hear if there were footsteps at all, or just his own imagination.

He determined it was his imagination as Schneider began to disappear from sight, and he ran to catch up, boots crashing through brittle sticks and impacting the soft dirt of the forest floor.

He found the clearing he’d suspected, and Schneider standing in it, before the ruins of a house – a shack, really – of grey, weatherbeaten wood, collapsing into the earth with trees growing up to the doorstep, delicate aspens with leaves like hands brushing against the wood in the light breeze. As he came closer to Schneider, he saw that he was trying to light a cigarette, his head bent close in concentration, his body stiff and still; as he came even closer, footsteps suddenly soft on the almost groomed-looking grass, Hollis saw that Schneider had already lit the cigarette, its tip glowing a faint red, and was staring at the match he had used to light it, eyes fixed on the tiny flame with its center of yellow and corona of red.

Whatever spell or mesmeric trance had had its hold over Schneider broke as Hollis stepped towards him, and he snuffed the match with a careless gesture of his hand, then dropped it to the earth and ground it under his boot. He sniffed and tugged at the brim of his hat. [ **I actually still like most of this paragraph and the previous one, even though nothing happens except Schneider trying to light a smoke. Incidentally, cigarettes had been brought to the West about 20 years prior during the Crimean War. I didn’t exactly research their popularity for plot reasons which, as I may have mentioned, I will reveal at the end of this repost. This longass, never-ending repost.** ]

“So – what exactly are we doing?” Hollis caught himself on the edge of adding a respectful  _doctor_  to the end of his sentence, but refused to use Schneider’s Christian name. It felt odd to be on such close terms with Schneider after having known him for so little time [ **Hollis cannot decide whether he’s known Valentine for ‘basically forever’ or 'hardly any time’. In someone else’s writing I’d give this a pass as 'ahh look character development’ but given it’s me, I assure you, it’s just me being a terrible writer.** ]; therefore, Hollis avoided the terminology whenever he could.

“Procuring supplies for the Union Army,” Schneider said, his tones as clipped as ever.

“Such as what?”

Schneider’s cigarette dangled from his lip, and he gestured to the shack. “I need wood. A door, anything we can use for a stretcher.” [ **The short scene that follows this, up until Hollis leaves the shack, is actually not all that bad. I mean, compared to everything else here…** ]

“Yes, sir,” Hollis muttered, and tramped towards the front door of the shack, long since fallen in.

He ducked inside and the temperature dropped; the roof had not yet collapsed, and the rays of the sun were blocked from entering that way. Slats of light poked their way in through the gaps in the boards of the walls; Hollis examined them to see if any of them were worth taken, but they sounded rotten at his knock, and none of them were longer than a yard. Not worth the effort, he decided, though if Schneider wanted to spend a day or two pulling down a shack, so be it. The floor was dirt, packed down by the feet of the vanished inhabitants and scattered with fallen leaves that must have blown in through the open door.

The front door hung on one hinge, and Hollis braced himself before tugging it free; the metal gave with a shrill creak and the door came free of its mooring. He let it down gently onto the dirt and it fell with a thump. There were holes bored for a metal handle to be screwed in, but the handle was nowhere to be seen; probably it had gone with the inhabitants, wherever they were, or been stolen by an opportunist.

He wiped his palms clean on his trousers and stepped away from the fallen door; there might be other items of value in the shack.

There was nothing, or at least very little; even the furniture had gone. He found scraps of cloth swept into the corner of the sleeping room, and scrapings of wood in another corner, along with drifts of fallen leaves from previous years, but nothing they could use. The scraps might do for kindling, but the shack itself was in the middle of a forest.

He went back for the door, bent, and lifted it up onto its side, the easier to move it through the doorway. He put his shoulder to it and shoved at the weathered wood, scooting the door across the earthen floor.

Once he had cleared the doorway, he pushed the door a few steps farther to ensure it would fall free of the doorway, and let it drop with a thud to the ground.

Schneider wasn’t there.

Hollis sighed, and scrubbed at his forehead with his cuff.  _If I were Valentine Schneider, where would I be?_

He looked first, reflexively, down at the packed earth of the clearing. It was dry, and he made out no footprints, not even his own, under the scatter of rotting leaves. Looking back up he saw no sign of Schneider anywhere within vision; the young trees crowding at the edge of the clearing waved to and fro, but Hollis could see yards past them into the forest proper, where still, there was no sign of Schneider.

He listened, focusing on a sound he had previously ignored, and realized that he was rather a fool; he could hear Schneider whistling, and the sound was coming from around the back of the shack.

Hollis idly tried to place the tune as he walked towards the vicinity of the whistling, but found himself unable. It was a waltz, that much he was sure of, but there was a melancholy air to it, and it sounded irritatingly familiar, as if he had heard it once before, a long time ago. [ **If I still remembered what song, if any, I was thinking of here – I’d tell you.** ] He could always ask Schneider, he mused, but that was a risky proposition: he might get an answer, or he might get a door slammed in his face. Or worse, God willing.

He went around a thin beech tree that had grown up almost against the wall of the shack, and saw Schneider in what had once passed for a garden, kneeling in his shirtsleeves on the ground, his frock coat thrown over a branch of an apple tree. He had produced a little jack-knife and held it in one hand between his fingers, though his attention seemed to be somewhere else; the fingers of his free hand drummed absently on the dirt, and his whistling continued. There was a little pile of rather stunted vegetables next to him; Hollis saw turnips and a few carrots, as well as odd red, lumpy things that he didn’t recognize, but which looked healthy enough. Perhaps they were some sort of overgrown berry; they looked almost like crabapples. [ **Hollis is the biggest hick to ever hick. They are tomatoes, and in the real world they were a part of everyday food by this time.** ]

“Doctor Schneider?” Hollis said, remembering only too late Schneider’s liking of being called by his first name.

The whistling stopped and Schneider’s head turned; he looked up at Hollis, a confused expression on his face for a moment before it cleared away and was replaced by mild neutrality.

“Hello, Hollis,” he said, and began picking his nails with the knife. Not that it made much of a difference; there was dirt and what was probably blood caked into the cuticle as well, unreachable by anything short of a good scrubbing with soap and water.

Hollis nodded and reflexively tugged the brim of his hat. “All that’s worth taking is the door – I took it off the hinges and came for you.”

“Thank you,” said Schneider, clasping the knife to hide its blade and slipping it into his trouser pocket. He cocked his head to the side, hand dangling near his pocket. “Bitte – do you… hear anything?”

Hollis turned around, scanning the forest he’d just come through. He  _did_  hear something – soft footsteps, fast-paced. It wasn’t a person, too light for that –

Something heavy slammed into his chest, and Hollis found himself quite suddenly on the ground in the remains of the shack’s pathetic garden, with a snarling dog crouched on top of him. [ **The dog was to have become a character in his own right, though I never did get that far. His grandson or something like that was to appear in the 1896 arc, though again I never got that far. Also, there’s no good reason for him to tackle Hollis like this, though it’s not impossible that either: “omg new friend new friend!!” and jumped him as some dogs do; he is already acquainted with Valentine, and thought Hollis was a threat. Or make up your own, it won’t be dumber than whatever I was thinking when I wrote this.** ]

He froze, though it was hard not to quiver with fear with those powerful jaws inches from his throat and breath that smelled like rotten meat puffing in his face –  _why’d you sign up for the army if you didn’t expect to die?_  he thought rather incoherently.

He heard the thump of boots, someone running nearby, and then a voice shouting.

“Arthur! Down!”

The dog trembled, but kept its paws planted on Hollis’s chest. Damn, but the animal was heavy – solidly built, like the other dogs Hollis had seen in camp. Well, aside from the delicate hunting hounds obviously brought by officers from somewhere else.

“ _Arthur_!” He rolled his eyes, looking for the shouter, and saw a blurry shape in Union uniform. Wonderful.

Boots thumped on the dirt, and the blur approached; Hollis recognized it as Ashley Royce as it grew closer.

The dog held firm, a growl rumbling in its chest as it lowered its muzzle to sniff at Hollis.

“Arthur,  _off_ ,” said Ashley. [ **Hollis’s character got worse and worse the farther I got, I think – if he thinks of his immediate superior, who has invited him to use his Christian name, by his surname, why does he think of another man superior to him by his first name? I dunno.** ]

The dog – Arthur, since no person by that name appeared to be in the vicinity – relaxed slightly, but didn’t move.

Hollis realized that he was having a spot of trouble breathing.

He heard a sigh from overhead, and hands reached down to grab the dog by its scruff and drag it away. Claws dug into his shirt for a moment, and then the dog allowed itself to be removed from him.

Hollis immediately brushed off his shirtfront with quick motions of his hands, and then sprang to his feet, assessing the dog (still restrained by one of Ashley’s hands knotted in its scruff) for hints of aggression. Its teeth were bared, but it wasn’t attempting to lunge forward and bite off his knees; there was that.

He stepped back from the animal instinctively nonetheless, and was quite literally struck by a reminder of his stupidity in the face of danger. Not hard, and not anywhere vital, but he was struck anyway; to be precise, he was struck on the left thigh by the gun Schneider had loaned him that morning, as his coat shifted from his movement. [ **This is it. This is my least favorite paragraph.** ]

He’d been safe the entire time, if he’d just moved his left hand to his coat pocket.

Hollis resisted the urge to slap himself for gross stupidity. Not that he would’ve been able to shoot the animal – even after weeks of participating in gruesome surgery, he still doubted his ability to kill on command [ **Yes, this was probably going to be foreshadowing.** ]– but he was sure the animal would have backed off with a weapon pressed to its skull. Most things did. Those that didn’t weren’t worth keeping alive, for the most part.

Now that the dog was no longer growling threateningly in his face, he could get a better look at it: massive, stocky-bodied, with a long nose. The fur was thick and dark, mostly grey with black mottling, and the eyes were a clear amber.

“Sorry about that,” said Ashley, releasing the dog’s scruff. “Apparently you smell like a German to Arthur.” He stroked the top of the dog’s head affectionately; it panted and closed its eyes. “Once you get him going like that it’s hard to get him to stand down.”

“Thank you,” Hollis said. He shed his frock coat and shook it clean of the dust ground into it while he’d been flat on the ground. It still smelled faintly of wet dog from the incident where he’d been caught in the rain a week ago – despite what he’d been told on receiving the garment, it was not in any way water proof – but it looked clean enough, which was the most important thing in the Union Army: look your part, especially if you had none of the qualifications for said part other than the right look.

“No trouble,” said Ashley, who then turned to Schneider, who was still, for whatever reason, crouched on the ground and focused on coaxing vegetables from it. “Doctor.”

“Hallo.” He pulled up a potato [ **Where did the potatoes come from? They’re not mentioned earlier in this scene and should have been** ], brushed a little of the clinging dirt off of it, and set it aside. Well, he didn’t seem to be interested in talking… but when was Schneider ever interested in talking, anyway? “What brings you here, Lieutenant?”

He gave the word an unusual pronunciation, one that Hollis had to guess was European:  _left_ -tenant, not  _loo_ -tenant. Perhaps he really was a defecting German. Not that Hollis had ever doubted Schneider’s nationality, but… well, he had his moments, which was really the least you could say of the man. Hollis had almost used that exact wording in his first letter home: 'he’s a nice enough man, but he has his moments’, and oh, did he have his moments.

Ashley shrugged. “I was taking Arthur for a walk. He’s been cooped up for a while in my quarters after he took that shrapnel two weeks ago. Thank you for removing it, by the way. I know you’re not a veterinarian, Doctor, but your help is greatly appreciated nonetheless.”

“Bitte sehr,” said Schneider mildly, extracting another potato from the earth. “It is the least I can do for the Hunde who give us so much help on the battlefield, hm?”

Ashley nodded. “May I ask what you are doing here, Doctor?”

“Of course you may, Lieutenant.” Schneider was normally rather stiff, yes, but not  _this_  stiff - Hollis had to wonder what was going on. Was there bad blood between the two of them? Or was Schneider simply in one of his mercurial bad moods? It could be either one of them, or both.

Knowing Schneider, it was probably both.

[ **I will tell the full story later, but the actual tale is that Valentine and Ashley had their first meeting, essentially, over the barrel of a gun. Ashley never fully trusts Valentine, and this was to be a running theme through this arc and the one in 1896**.]

He scratched at the earth with his jack-knife, apparently taking his sweet time to think the question over. Or perhaps he had simply run out of potatoes; he clasped the knife shut and stuffed it into his pocket.

_Wait, what?_

He must have unclasped it while Hollis was under attack by Arthur, Hollis decided for his own peace of mind.

[ **This was a rare attempt by me at lazily resolving a minor inconsistency. Why this and none of the dozens of others, I don’t know.** ]

Ashley inclined his head. “Well?”

Schneider brushed his hands clean on his trousers and stood. “I am in the process of procuring supplies from the Union Army; specifically, we require stretchers to transport the wounded within the hospital. Herr Downey, presumably, has located a suitable piece of wood for that use.”

“Very well, then,” said Ashley. “Off the record, sir - what are you doing in the garden, then? I don’t see any stretchers here.”

Schneider was silent.

Arthur nosed at Hollis’s hand, and he, raised among hunting hounds, absently scratched behind the animal’s ears for a moment before realizing that five minutes previously the dog had been one command from its master away from tearing out Hollis’s throat.

Hmph, he decided, and continued to scratch. Life was strange, and there would never be a dog that objected to a scratch behind the ears. If this one happened to, well, he would die as the exception that proved the rule.

Schneider pushed his glasses further up his nose. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m obtaining food supplies from a place the common soldiers haven’t yet discovered, and hopefully never will.”

Ashley shrugged. “Sorry, doctor. I just wanted to be sure you weren’t planting land mines or something.” [ **Someday I’ll verify whether this is historically possible or just “something I vaguely remembered and thought was really cool”. I think it’s the latter, like most of this draft.** ]

“We have land mines now?” He sounded interested.  _Well_ , Hollis thought nervously,  _perhaps he’s interested because he wants to know what he’s up against as a surgeon._

“We don’t, not yet,” Ashley said. “The Krau – erm, the Germans do. Sorry, doctor.” He tugged at the brim of his hat in deference. “But we probably will too before much longer; there’s a few men back at headquarters trying to design one of our own that’s even better, or some way to neutralize or at least detect the ones the Germans put down.”

Schneider nodded. “Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“Bitte, ensure that our… mines will not damage the men they are intended to protect. [ **This is put very poorly so I’ll translate: 'please try to make them stable so they don’t explode when being placed’.** ] I am the one who must put them back together, and I would not appreciate sloppy work increasing the amount of repairs I must undertake.”

“Understood.” He whistled and Arthur shot out from beneath Hollis’s hand to his master’s side. He tugged the brim of his hat again and offered Schneider a smile. “I’d best be going, doctor. I’m expected back at headquarters in half an hour. Tactics discussion, as usual. I expect I’ll be seeing you later?”

“Of course,” said Schneider softly. “I look forward to your company, Herr Royce.”

Hollis dared to hope that this promise from Schneider to Ashley meant that he wouldn’t be bothered by the German that night - perhaps he might actually be able to sleep.

[ **Overall this isn’t bad but it’s not good either.]**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note, 2018: originally, the plot was going to be divided between 1875 (what you're reading now) and 1896, with essentially the same cast of characters. I don't think it's too visible in this draft, so didn't mention it until now, but given that it's alluded to in the notes here, I felt obligated.


	8. Chapter 8

For the second time in his short tenure as a soldier, Hollis was awoken by a bucket of water to the face. [ **I don’t remember the first time, though I think it’s when Hollis and Valentine first shipped out.** ]

This time, however, it wasn’t Schneider wielding the bucket, but Jenkins, his scarred face inscrutable.

“Doc says you’re needed at the front,” he said, expression unchanging as Hollis sputtered and scrubbed his face dry with his handkerchief.

“How soon?” He shrugged on yesterday’s shirt and began to button it up; if he was being sent to the front a little blood on the cuffs wouldn’t matter.

“Soon’s you can, he said.” Jenkins coughed into his sleeve, spat on the dirt of the threshold. “Camp’s in an uproar. There’s a wagon waiting for you, which I’m to escort you to.”

He wound his puttees about his ankles, yanked his boots on and tightened the laces.  _Oh, why did I volunteer_?

“What’s happened that they need us?” he said, peering out past Jenkins into the summer morning. There was a low mist in the hollow, but like as not it would be heavy and hot later in the day. Appearances be damned, his uniform coat was staying behind. [ **This is in-line with Hollis’s character, technically. But not as it’s been shown to the reader, so it’s still out of character for him.** ]

“Krauts are on the move again,” said Jenkins. “Left us some presents before they went, though. It’s a regular massacre.”

“Did they leave mines behind or men?” No time for worn apron or lab coat, and not much point in them. [ **Except, you know, visually identifying himself as a doctor.** ] Even if he wore something over his clothes, it’d be soaked dripping wet with blood by the time he got done.

“Both. Let’s go.”

Jenkins stepped aside and Hollis slipped by him; the end of his peg-leg had impressed a circle in the earth at his door. [ **This is a pointless observation, akin to saying “he’d been standing there so long he _left footprints in the ground_ ”.**  **Wow.** ]

“They’re waiting down to the way going north,” Jenkins said, plodding up the hill. “We’ll go straight through the camp to save you time.”

“Fine,” Hollis muttered, pulling his cap down further over his hair and scratching at his cheek with his fingertips. No time for shaving this morning, not with Jenkins glowering at him from the doorway.

The camp was bustling, seething with activity. Men stood shaving or stomping their cloth-wrapped feet into boots. [ **If they weren’t surrounded by poor execution, some of the detail here is less than terrible. This campaign has lasted at least two years, and, well, where are you going to buy socks in the meantime?** ] They crouched before cook fires of whatever wood they could find, red-eyed from the smoke.

Hollis knew some of their faces, had treated them for small ills before. He wondered how many of them might soon be on the operating table before him; he didn’t doubt that the army would be moving in pursuit of the Germans before long, and that meant engaging them in combat as well.

They seemed to be invisible as Jenkins strode down the path between tents; some of the boys looked at him with curious eyes, but most ignored the odd pair they made, the tall hulking Irishman and the slim Southern gentleman in his wake. [ **A few too many adjectives here, but it’s worth pointing out that Jenkins isn’t that tall and Hollis isn’t terribly slim, though he’s anything but stout at this point. I didn’t make a point of it, but this entire story arc was filtered through Hollis’s eyes, which I think is something I might change for a future draft.** ]

The mist was beginning to clear, but the air was still relatively cool, not yet humid and clinging to the skin like a crust of mud. His mouth felt dry, his back still tense and tight from one final operation the night before.

Schneider was waiting for them beside the wagon, his face blank, his cheeks clean-shaven, every strand of his hair in its proper place, every inch the army surgeon. [ **This also pertains to the running theme: Valentine manages to keep his true feelings under wraps until the grand finale of this arc, which I will probably talk about later. Where Hollis spent this arc both being disillusioned and getting a sense of a purpose he could serve, Valentine spends it falling apart. At this point he still keeps the veneer of sanity on, but this was going to begin to shatter in the next few chapters.** ] Shouts filled the air and dogs panted at their masters’ sides while waiting to board the wagon, but Schneider stood impervious as ever to the commotion.

“Danke, Herr Jenkins,” he said.

“Don’t see why you thought he needed an escort, Doc,” said the orderly.

Schneider smiled mildly, his eyes clear and serene, free of any human feeling. “No one troubles a man in your company, Jenkins. I had rather Mister Downey reach me at your side than he not reach me at all.”

“Right.” Jenkins spat and removed a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket. “Nothing else you need?”

“Nein. Be ready at the hospital, bitte.”

“Sure.” He screwed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and stuffed the packet back in his pocket, removing a battered tin of matches from the other. “Ye’ll be back by sundown?”

“I expect so,” said Schneider. “I trust you can manage by yourself until we return.”

“Yes, sir.” He shook out the match and dropped it to grind into the mud beneath his boot.

“Thank you,” he said. “Dismissed.”

Jenkins saluted and trudged off.

Schneider clasped his hands together. “You are ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Hollis muttered.

“No need to be nervous, Herr Downey. Hop on.”

Schneider fitted himself into the back of the wagon, watching without a word as Hollis did the same.

“You ready back there?” said a voice that Hollis could only guess was the wagon driver’s.

“Ja!” said Schneider.

The wagon began to bounce off down the path, which from what Hollis could see of it might someday bear the pretension of calling itself a road.

He wished he had a cup of coffee, or a little food - a square of hardtack, even. Then again, going on what he’d been told, it was better he not eat before his first encounter with the battlefield. [ **While the timeline was never clear here, I do have to say - during the several months he’s been serving, he’s been stuck here, waiting for a German attack, with everyone else. After this chapter they were going to finally pull up stakes and start pursuing the German forces, who had finally recovered from a crushing defeat occurring just before Hollis signed up.** ]

He doubted that, really. He’d been able to handle near-heatstroke while covered in blood with Schneider barking in German at his elbow in the surgical tent - why shouldn’t he be able to handle the same amount of gore outside?

There was a tap on his shoulder and he jerked back to attention.

“Here, mate. You look like you could use it.” A flask was thrust before his face, clutched in a rough and dirty hand, and he took it, cautiously unscrewing the cap and taking a sip. By the taste it was strong black coffee, spiked with some sort of rough alcohol.

Hollis pushed the flask back towards the hand of its owner, gasping his thanks.

He received a pat on the shoulder and a chuckle of amusement. “No trouble. You’ll get used to it.”

The thunder of artillery had grown distant by the time they arrived, and for the most part the field was silent, almost eerily so. He could hear the popping fire of a few rifles off further up along the road, and faint shouting, but the only noise here was the whistle of the wind in the trees and the screams of the wounded.

Schneider was the first off the wagon, moving himself to the side and calmly brushing himself clean of dust as the other passengers began to disembark.

“Er - Valentine?” said Hollis as he made his way over to the doctor.

“Yes?” He adjusted the angle of his cap, resettled his glasses on his nose.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Schneider leveled a cool stare at him. “You follow me,” he said curtly. “We are to assess whether or not the injured here are - able to be saved. If they are, you flag down a member of the corps, who will bring a stretcher. If not, we leave them.”

 _Leave them?_  “Yes, sir,” said Hollis, knowing by now better than to talk back to Schneider.

“Good man,” he said, watching as the other passengers hopped down from the wagon’s bed. The dogs seemed subdued, ears pricked attentively, eyes watchful, tongues lolling from mouths.

A tall man in homespun uniform swaggered up to Schneider, forage cap cocked on his head. “‘Lo, doctor.”

“Leonard,” Schneider said coolly. “How’s your arm?”

He bared a mouthful of filthy teeth. “Wonderful. This fellow’s new, isn’t he?” he asked, indicating Hollis with a nod of his head.

Schneider clapped Hollis on the back. “He’s been with me in the surgery for the past few months, but this is his first time, ah - seeing the elephant, isn’t that how you put it?”

“He doesn’t look too impressed,” grinned the man in homespun. He stuck out his hand and turned to Hollis. “Name’s Leonard Meehan. I’m with the ambulance corps. 'Spect we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

“Hollis Downey,” he replied. “I’m - his assistant.”

“Good, good.” Meehan patted the dog at his side. “This’s Thor. Say hello to the gentlemen.”

The dog wagged its tail, barked. One of its ears was missing almost entirely, lending the dog the same uneven appearance its master had.

“Good lad.” Meehan ruffled the dog’s scruff. He touched his hand to the brim of his cap in a half-salute. “I’d stay for a chat, but we’ve both got work to do. Nice t’ meet you.”

Meehan turned on his heel and went off up the path where it began to disintegrate into the woods.

“Do you know him?” asked Hollis.

“I do,” said Schneider. “He had the bad fortune to get between enemy shot and its intended recipient. I put him back together.” He grinned toothily. “Herr Meehan has lent me a hand now and again since then as thanks.”

 _He slipped me a flask of coffee on the wagon up here._  Hollis adjusted his cap. [ **It really doesn’t matter that it was Meehan with the coffee. The point of both interactions with average soldiers is that Hollis fits in with them much better than Valentine does. Valentine receives only grudging acceptance.** ]

“Let’s go then,” said Schneider. “The more time we waste, the fewer of the wounded will survive to reach the hospital.”

Hollis made a short bow. “After you, then.”

Schneider straightened his glasses, brushed a stray lock of hair off of his forehead, and shoved his sleeves up to his elbows. “Let’s go.”

Hollis followed in his wake, boots crunching on the dead grass.

The battlefield smelled like the surgery did - blood and earth and stale air - with a faint aroma of smoke. A cool breeze began to blow, tickling the back of Hollis’s neck as he followed Schneider into the tall grass.

“Bring your kit when you go to the battlefield,” Schneider had said to him. “Fill your canteen and bring any bottles you can find.”

He understood that directive now; around him the wounded cried out for water.

Schneider flitted from body to body, assessing conditions with a glance. Many of the soldiers looked like little more than children. Most were dead where they lay. Some of the living had flies buzzing around them or crawling on their faces. Invariably Schneider left these behind. The chunks of what had been men received not even a passing glance as Schneider strode on by.

Hollis passed a lad who looked the same age as Liam lying face-up on the dirt and thought him dead until he blinked. His hair lay lank on his filthy face and one hand was pressed tightly to the center of a blood splatter on his stomach. “Water,” he gasped, “please.” [ **This character is an example of a common type in modern books about 19th century wars, especially the Civil War (which is what I based the Army in this piece on, insofar as I did** _any_ **research). Go ahead.**   **Guess**.]

Schneider had gone on ahead. Hollis glanced helplessly after him, then knelt next to the boy and uncapped his canteen. There were no flies crawling on him, and his face still had color; perhaps there was hope for this one.

“Can you sit up?”

“No,” the boy said, his voice rough, lips bleeding.

Hollis tipped the canteen carefully until a stream of water fell from its mouth to the boy’s lips. Most of it dribbled down his face, wetting his downy cheek.

_Not even old enough to shave._

He heard Schneider’s footsteps in the grass, boots crushing the dry stems. “Most of them aren’t worth saving, Hollis,” he said tiredly.

“This one might be,” said Hollis as the boy licked feebly at the water streaming over his face. Blood had crusted on one temple, matting his hair.

“Gott im Himmel but I hate war.” He sighed and beckoned over a member of the corps. “Come on. We’ve work to do. Leave him.”

* * *

Hollis sucked in a deep breath of iron-scented air and jerked his head back, attempting to dislodge a sweaty lock of hair from its position over his eye. Schneider was busy at the other side of the tent conducting an amputation.

The boy’s eyelids fluttered and his lip twitched slightly, cracking a thin stream of dried blood on his cheek.

Hollis swore and swiped the surface of the laceration running across the boy’s pale stomach. He was only half-done suturing, but they couldn’t spare any more ether to keep his patient unconscious. He’d just have to work quickly.

The boy, whoever he was, had been relatively lucky - rather than catching a Minie ball to the gut, he’d had a run-in with a bayonet or long knife, judging by the length of the laceration across his abdomen. And again he’d been lucky in encountering one of the few German soldiers who didn’t know what to do with a knife - rather than run him through with the tip, his assailant had slashed at him with the edge, catching the heavy wool of his uniform and tearing at the soft skin of his stomach.

The most difficult part of fixing the boy up had been suturing the ragged edges of the laceration; the blade had stopped short of the peritoneum, but the wound itself was almost as long as Hollis’s forearm. If infection didn’t take him, he’d have an impressive scar to show for his brush with death.

Hollis wiped some of the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Realistically, he knew that he’d be dripping with sweat again in a moment and that now he had blood to clean from his forehead as well as his arms and hands, but in the moment it gave him relief.

He tied off another strand of thread. Schneider had insisted on small, neat stitches whenever possible, but he wasn’t watching now, looming over him like a bird of prey.

He wasn’t sloppy, exactly, but his stitches were no smaller than absolutely required - no need to waste time on the boy.

Across the tent, Schneider cursed in German, and Hollis heard the quiet thud of a severed limb falling from the table, followed by the scraping as he wiped bone dust from the saw. If nothing else the man was meticulous with his instruments.

Hollis tied off his final suture and paused, needle still between his fingers - neither he nor Schneider had called for the man, but he heard Jenkins’ slow footsteps outside. Usually the Irishman was shy of work, and only approached the surgery when called for.

He set the needle down on its tin and patted the blood away from the row of stitches running across the boy’s stomach. His arms were crusted nearly to the elbows with gore, shirtfront and cuffs liberally splattered. Whatever he wanted, it had better be quick.

At the other side of the tent Schneider was rinsing his instruments in a bowl of pinkish water, humming to himself as his patient began to stir. The boy and the amputation were the last two surgeries for the night. Hollis was more than ready to get out of the tent.

As the footsteps drew closer he heard a faint patter outside, as of rain. Wonderful. The whole camp would be mud.

He swished his hands idly in the washing bowl, watching flakes of blood detach themselves from his skin and drift to the bottom, the water blooming a faint orange around his fingers.

“Jenkins?” he called.

“Doc. Could use your help.”

Schneider went to the tent flap and yanked it open. “Was ist los-” [ **“What’s wrong-** _”_ ]

Hollis turned; if it could stop Schneider in his tracks, it was probably worth his time.

It was Anderson, unconscious, blood running openly from his mouth and abdomen, dripping from Jenkins’s hands onto the earth, muddying it with puddles of crimson.

_Oh, not you again._

The boy was still out cold, and Schneider preferred to operate on 'his’ table anyway - Hollis darted to the other side of the tent and helped Schneider’s patient off the table, where he stood, clutching the stump of his arm to his chest and swaying slightly on his feet. The linen wrapped around the stump as bandage was yellowing and frayed at the edges. Probably it had had a former life as a sheet somewhere.

“Jenkins,” said Schneider. “On the table, bitte.”

It was less of a table than an assembly of whatever wood scraps were to hand held together by liberal application of nails, but Jenkins laid Anderson down on it anyway. [ **Where did that door from last chapter go?** ]

“Sorry, Doc,” he said. “I heard the others all raising hell, and when I came to see what was the matter there was blood all over. I brought him straight here.”

“Danke.” Schneider rubbed his hands together and stared down at his patient.

Jenkins showed himself out as Hollis rushed for tools not encrusted in blood, clean scraps of cloth, a bowl of water. Usually they saved the least messy operations for the end of the night; they had not been granted that courtesy this time.

The boy was still unconscious as Hollis clattered materials within easy reach of the table, and if he knew what was good for him he’d stay that way.

Valentine had a scalpel in his hand before the tools had stopped clattering on the table, cutting with one hand and ripping at Anderson’s shirt with the other. The blood-sodden cloth tore easily, some of it stiff and stuck with clots, some wet and limp. He flung the scraps to the floor, slicing through the bandages and letting them fall aside.

The incision where Schneider had opened Anderson’s abdomen hadn’t healed; its edges oozed (he had spoken of “laudable pus” to Hollis, but this couldn’t be it, not with that  _smell_ ) and the holes where thread pierced the skin were red and swollen. It parted like a seam when Schneider passed his scalpel down the center, gaping open as a smile.

Anderson was already dead.

His intestines had been pink and slick the last time they’d cut him open, veins pulsing with blood - now spiderwebs of black spread over his organs, clutching like fingers and reeking of rot.

“Scheisse.”

Schneider wiped some of the blood from the scalpel off on his lab coat and flicked his sweat-matted hair away from his forehead with a toss of his head. “Forceps,” he snapped.

Hollis thrust their last pair into his hand, and Schneider began to peel and prod at the black mass in Anderson’s abdomen, scratching at the dead tissue with the metal tips. With his other hand he began to probe with the scalpel, dissecting around the edges with the skill of a butcher. Or a surgeon.

Blood welled up from the veins of the healthy tissue and Hollis dabbed cautiously at it with a scrap of rag, smearing it away from where Schneider was working. It was better than nothing.

Anderson gasped in a deep breath and a thin whine escaped his lips, his exposed organs quivering with the motion of his diaphragm. His eyes rolled to and fro under their lids.

Schneider’s hands trembled as he cut at the edges of the dead bowel. “Have we any chloroform, Hollis?”

He’d used the last of it on the boy. “I think we have a little ether left.”

“That will do.” He made one last slice and began to tug gently at the tissue, pulling it away from the healthy intestine. “Get it and dose him. I’d rather he not wake up while I have my hands in his guts.”

Hollis turned away and began scattering through the mess on 'his’ side of the tent. The little glass bottle had been everywhere he put his hand all day - where had it gone now?

There was a squelch and another faint whine behind him, and Schneider added, “Unless you’d rather hold him down yourself, of course. I leave that to you.”

He scattered harder, leaving an abominable mess behind him which he knew full well he would have total responsibility for cleaning up. God forbid Schneider ever lift a finger when it came to the care of his own surgery.

A wad of cotton came to hand before the agent it was meant to carry, and he snatched it up; mostly clean, wonder of wonders, though faded by rough use to the color and roughness of sand.

His fingertips met cool glass on an instrument table as a shrill wail pierced the air, and with the bottle secure in his grasp he lunged back to Schneider’s side.

“Fine timing you have,” he said, lump of corruption cradled in one hand as he cut its last moorings to the healthy intestine around it. “I can’t see for alle seine Blut, and I believe he’s waking up.”

Hollis unstopped the ether and counted out a dose into the cotton. “Eine Moment, Valentine, bitte.”

Schneider bared his teeth in a parody of a smile and let his handful of blood and rot fall to the floor with a wet thump. “Danke, Hollis.”

[ **Place your guesses now for “who is the new character” and “what was going to kill Anderson?”** ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! Next chapter -- a post I wrote summarizing attempts at foreshadowing in this draft.


	9. Chapter 9

I promised a post outlaying all the foreshadowing in the second draft. This is that post.

Oh, and as a note to you and myself: I will  _not_  be doing a repost/autopsy of the first draft because it makes me gag.

* * *

 

Chapter 1:

_“_ _She was wearing blue, and it brought out her eyes, made them look the color of the bright summer sky; would he ever see her so again?”_

He does not. She dies in childbirth about six months after the last chapter I finished.

Chapter 9:

_“_ _As if he’s going to live through having had my hands in him, Hollis thought…”_

Anderson (the character to whom this refers) was going to die of sepsis due to peritonitis contracted from unsanitary surgical techniques.

_“_ _He blew out the Blau lamp they’d been using to make it easier to see during the surgery (although not much easier, given the flickering, uncertain quality of its light)…”_

The big reveal of the entire series was to be that, rather than being a slightly off 1875/1896, it was all set in a post-oil-crisis “about two hundred years from now”. This would be why they’re using a small alcohol-burning lamp rather than one burning a petroleum derivative.

This chapter also contains Valentine complaining about the poorness of his circumstances. Hollis would construe this as a citified German complaining about battlefield conditions and having to get his hands dirty. This is true, but what is also the case (and may or may not have ever been revealed in-text, I never planned it out) is that Valentine is being forced to work with materials and methods more than two centuries before his native time.

Chapter 11:

_“_ _Anderson’s hand flew to his throat suddenly, and he made a gagging sound, his face twisting with pain and nausea before he vomited a fountain of bright red blood onto Hollis’s shirtfront.”_

It’s not only sepsis that will kill Anderson. Apparently he’s also been wounded in the lung. Not that it matters since he dies a few days to a week later.

Chapter 13:

_“_ _It was thoroughly odd, when he thought about it - Schneider had probably spent a large period of his life in industrial, citified Germany, where Hollis had grown up in the woods and hollows of western Georgia. And yet Schneider slipped through the woods like a shadow, while Hollis crashed along behind him.”_

Valentine spent about a year to eighteen months in the German army on the other side of this war. The German settlers are fighting guerrilla-style, while the Americans are essentially re-fighting the Civil War, which I never decided on if it had happened in this timeline or not.

Hollis does not, at this point, know that Valentine actually fought on the other side – only that he was a doctor.

_“_ _Hollis passed a lad who looked the same age as Liam lying face-up on the dirt and thought him dead until he blinked.”_

I don’t remember whether I ever named this character, but they were a biological female. I never did decide whether they were a trans man, or a cis woman taking a male role to serve in the Army. Either way, Hollis was to befriend them in the chapters after this. I never decided what was to happen after that.

 _“_ _Anderson was already dead._   _His intestines had been pink and slick the last time they’d cut him open, veins pulsing with blood - now spiderwebs of black spread over his organs, clutching like fingers and reeking of rot._

This is part payoff and part foreshadowing. Valentine’s attempt to save his life by excising dead tissue here does nothing. Apparently I really liked to write gore, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all there is! 
> 
> [The tumblr where I originally posted this](http://echoflux.tumblr.com). It got flagged as explicit for some bizarre reason, which spurred my decision to move all this text over here. But if you're able to view it, it does contain some additional content related to this story.


End file.
